Читать книгу A Source Book of Mediæval History - Various - Страница 22

The Venerable Bede, the author of the passage given below, was born about 673 in Northumberland and spent most of his life in the Benedictine abbey of Jarrow on the Tyne, where he died in 735. He was a man of broad learning and untiring industry, famous in all parts of Christendom by reason of the numerous scholarly books that he wrote. The chief of these was his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, covering the period from the first invasion of Britain by Cæsar (B.C. 55) to the year 731. In this work Bede dealt with many matters lying properly outside the sphere of church history, so that it is exceedingly valuable for the light which it throws on both the military and political affairs of the early Anglo-Saxons in Britain. As an historian Bede was fair-minded and as accurate as his means of information permitted.

The Angle and Saxon seafarers from the region we now know as Denmark and Hanover had infested the shores of Britain for two centuries or more before the coming of Hengist and Horsa which Bede here describes. The withdrawal of the Roman garrisons about the year 410 left the Britons at the mercy of the wilder Picts and Scots of the north and west, and as a last resort King Vortigern decided to call in the Saxons to aid in his campaign of defense. Such, at least, is the story related by Gildas, a Romanized British chronicler who wrote about the year 560, and this was the view adopted by Bede. Recent writers, as Mr. James H. Ramsay in his Foundations of England, are inclined to cast serious doubts upon the story because it seems hardly probable that any king would have taken so foolish a step as that attributed to Vortigern.[70] At any rate, whether by invitation or for pure love of seafaring adventure, certain it is that the Saxons and Angles made their appearance at the little island of Thanet, on the coast of Kent, and found the country so much to their liking that they chose to remain rather than return to the over-populated shores of the Baltic. There are many reasons for believing that people of Germanic stock had been settled more or less permanently in Britain long before the traditional invasion of Hengist and Horsa. Yet we are justified in thinking of this interesting expedition as, for all practical purposes, the beginning of the long and stubborn struggle of Germans to possess the fruitful British isle. While Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Vandals and Lombards were breaking across the Rhine-Danube frontier and finding new homes in the territories of the Roman Empire, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the farther north were led by their seafaring instincts to make their great movement, not by land, but by water, and into a country which the Romans had a good while before been obliged to abandon. There they were free to develop their own peculiar Germanic life and institutions, for the most part without undergoing the changes which settlement among the Romans produced in the case of the tribes whose migrations were towards the Mediterranean.

Source—Bæda, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [Bede, "Ecclesiastical History of the English People"], Bk. I., Chaps. 14–15. Translated by J. A. Giles (London, 1847), pp. 23–25.

They consulted what was to be done,[71] and where they should seek assistance to prevent or repel the cruel and frequent incursions The Britons decide to call in the Saxons of the northern nations. And they all agreed with their king, Vortigern, to call over to their aid, from the parts beyond the sea, the Saxon nation; which, as the outcome still more plainly showed, appears to have been done by the inspiration of our Lord Himself, that evil might fall upon them for their wicked deeds.

In the year of our Lord 449,[72] Martian, being made emperor with Valentinian, the forty-sixth from Augustus, ruled the Empire seven years. Then the nation of the Angles, or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king, arrived in Britain with three long ships, and had a place assigned them to reside in by the same king, in the eastern part of the island,[73] that they might thus appear to be fighting for their country, while their real intentions were to enslave it. Accordingly they engaged with the enemy, who were come from the north to give battle, and obtained the victory; which, being known at home in their own country, as also the fertility of the islands and the cowardice of the Britons, a larger fleet was quickly sent over, bringing a still greater number of men, who, being added to the former, made The Saxons settle in the island up an invincible army. The newcomers received from the Britons a place to dwell, upon condition that they should wage war against their enemies for the peace and security of the country, while the Britons agreed to furnish them with pay.

Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the River Humber, and the other nations of the English.

The first two commanders are said to have been Hengist and Horsa. Horsa, being afterwards slain in battle by the Britons,[74] Hengist and Horsa was buried in the eastern part of Kent, where a monument bearing his name is still in existence. They were the sons of Victgilsus, whose father was Vecta, son of Woden; from whose stock the royal races of many provinces trace their descent. In a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and they began to increase so much that they became a terror to the natives themselves who had invited them. Then, having on a sudden entered into a league with the Picts, whom they had by this time repelled by The Saxons turn against the Britons the force of their arms, they began to turn their weapons against their confederates. At first they obliged them to furnish a greater quantity of provisions; and, seeking an occasion to quarrel, protested that unless more plentiful supplies were brought them they would break the confederacy and ravage all the island; nor were they backward in putting their threats in execution.

They plundered all the neighboring cities and country, spread the conflagration from the eastern to the western sea without any opposition, and covered almost every part of the island. Public as well as private structures were overturned; Their devastation of the country the priests were everywhere slain before the altars; the prelates and the people, without any respect of persons, were destroyed with fire and sword; nor were there any to bury those who had been thus cruelly slaughtered. Some of the miserable remainder, being taken in the mountains, were butchered in heaps. Others, driven by hunger, came forth and submitted themselves to the enemy for food, being destined to undergo perpetual servitude, if they were not killed upon the spot. Some, with sorrowful hearts, fled beyond the seas. Others, continuing in their own country, led a miserable life among the woods, rocks, and mountains, with scarcely enough food to support life, and expecting every moment to be their last.[75]