Anglo-Saxon England

“ In blood, it is probable that the importance of the Anglo-Saxon element has been generally over-estimated. It has been too usual to speak of England as though it were synonymous with Britain, and to overlook the numerical strength of the Celtic population in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. It has been too usual, also, to neglect the considerable Danish, Norwegian, and Norman element, which, though belonging to the same Low German and Scandinavian stock, yet differs in some important particulars from the Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ Germany had never been subdued to the Roman order; in Anglo-Saxon England, Roman civilization had been effaced by the Saxon conquest, which, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, was most complete in those parts of the land where the Roman influence had been strongest. In neither of these lands was there any antique atmosphere, or antique pagan substratum—save as the universal human soul is pagan! Latinity came to Germans and Anglo-Saxons as a foreign culture, which was not to pertain to all men's daily living. ”

“ WITH the origin of any nation its early institutions must necessarily have been closely connected. Some of the most interesting traces of Anglo-Saxon life may he followed as far back as the time of the settlement. The changes which time has brought about in the early institutions that came into England with our tribal forefathers make it difficult to form an accurate estimate of them from the knowledge we have of the organization that prevailed during the later part of the Old English period. ”

“ During that century England produced most of those saintly kings and queens whose names still enrich the calendar of the Anglo-Saxon Church, sovereigns who ruled their kingdoms with justice, lived in mortification, went on pilgrimages, died in cloisters. ”

“ It has been usual to represent the English conquest of South-eastern Britain as an absolute change of race throughout the greater part of our island. The Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly believed, came to England and the Lowlands of Scotland in overpowering numbers, and actually exterminated or drove into the rugged west the native Celts. The population of the whole country south of Forth and Clyde is supposed to be now, and to have been ever since the conquest, purely Teutonic or Scandinavian in blood, save only in Wales, Cornwall, and, perhaps, Cumberland and Galloway. ”

“ From what we have seen, in the course of the preceding chapters, society seems for a long time to have been at a standstill among the Anglo-Saxons, as though it had progressed as far as its own simple vitality would carry it, and wanted some new impulse to move it onwards. By the entrance of the Normans, the Saxon aristocracy was destroyed ”

“ Benefits however great, reforms however wise, are sure to be considered an impertinence by some. Then— there might be another "Restoration," and wary ambitious nobles were cautiously making a record which would not unfit them for its benefits when it came. He lived in an atmosphere of conspiracy, suspicion, and loyalty grudgingly bestowed. But these were only the surface currents. Anglo-Saxon England recognized in this foreign King, a man with the same race instincts, the same ideals of integrity, honor, justice and personal liberty, as her own ”

“ The country is divided into agricultural colonies, and its only industry is agriculture, its only wealth, land. We want but one more conspicuous change to make it into the England of the Augustan Anglo-Saxon age—the reign of Eadgar—and that one change is the consolidation of the discordant kingdoms under a single loose over-lordship. To understand this final step, we must glance briefly at the dull record of the political history.
Under Æthelfrith, Eadwine, and Oswiu, Northumbria had been the chief power in England. But the eighth century is taken up with the greatness of Mercia. ”

“ The relics of the Anglo-Saxon period that have been discovered in these districts present also some distinctive features. It is certain from the customs that prevailed, some of which have survived, from the remains found, from the old place-names, and from the variations in the shape of the skulls discovered, that the people of the Saxon kingdoms of England could not have been people of one race. ”

“ Their immigration into England was so large, and the area of the country they occupied so much greater in extent than their Continental homelands, that we are led, as in the case of the Saxons, to look for a confederacy, or an alliance of some kind, under which people of various tribes joined the Anglian expeditions. ”

“ The constitutional history of England is little more than the story of the steps by which the Anglo-Saxon, by the strength which this quality gave him, came to dominate the other races which invaded or settled in Britain and finally worked his way up to and through the Norman crust which, as it were, overlay the country. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon alone offers to the semi-civilised peoples that come under his control the advantages of intellectual and material development. The schoolhouse, the free press, agricultural and commercial development, are inseparable incidents of Anglo-Saxon sway. Political and material betterment are {217} the prizes it offers to the laggards in civilisation who come beneath its rule. This is what England offers in India, Egypt, and the Soudan; what the United States offers in the West Indies and the Philippines. ”

“ England has received her kings and her nobles from Normandy, Anjou, the Provence, Scotland, Holland, Hanover, often seeing a foreigner ascend her throne; yet the sturdy Anglo-Saxon character held its own, spite of the new element infused into its blood: change the ministries, change the dynasties often as they will, John Bull is obstinate as ever, and himself changes not; no philosophy or religion makes him less material. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon put on the new civilization and institutions brought him by the Conquest, as he would an embroidered garment; but the man within the garment, though modified by civilization, has never essentially changed. ”

“ SAXON CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.—In the fourth century, when the power of Rome was declining, the Picts and Scots from the North began to make incursions into the Roman province of Britain. At the same time Teutonic tribes from the mouths of the Weser and the Elbe, began to land as marauders upon the coast. Honorius withdrew the Roman troops from the island in 411; and it was conquered by these invading tribes, especially the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. They became one people, called Anglo-Saxons, Angles or English. ”

“ As in the times of the early Saxon kings, the cause breeding destruction was the widening distance between the king and the people. In those earlier times the people unresistingly lapsed into decadence, but the Anglo-Saxon had learned much since then, and it was not so safe to degrade him and trample on his rights. ”

“ With every royal marriage there is a fresh infusion of foreign blood drawn from fountains not always the purest,—until after centuries of such dilutions, the royal line has less of the Anglo-Saxon in it than any ancestral line in the Kingdom. ”

“ Men of many different races must have been among the ancestors of both the earlier and later Anglo-Saxon people.
In the eighth and ninth centuries three kingdoms in England bore the Saxon name, as mentioned by Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—viz., Essex, Sussex, and Wessex—and one province, Middlesex. As will be seen when considering the evidence relating to the settlers in various parts of England, it does not follow that these several parts of our country which were called after the Saxon name were colonized by people known as Saxons in Germany. ”

“ The aim of this volume is “to bring all the English-speaking peoples together by enabling them to realize their own characteristics.” And to this end the author “has covered the ground that the Anglo-Saxon occupies in anthropology, history, economics, art, theology, and everything else.... The privileged classes of England are a Latin survival, and so is the ‘boss’ of American politics. Nevertheless, Americans, Australians, and other Anglo-Saxons are far ahead of Great Britain in their progress towards true Anglo-Saxonism ”

“ The contest which soon ensued was a terrible struggle, or rather series of struggles, which continued for two centuries, during which the Anglo-Saxons were continually gaining ground and the Britons losing; the mental and physical superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race giving them with very few exceptions, every where and always the victory. ”

“ The Norman conquest gave us rulers, but not a people. The Saxon nobles gave way or amalgamated with the Norman blood, but the people were and remained an Anglo-Roman-and-Saxon people. Nothing is a more complete proof of this than the language, which in the days of the most regnant Norman dynasty remained Anglo-Saxon, and remains so still. Archbishop Trench, in his analysis of our modern English, shows that, if we divided it into 100 parts, sixty would be Saxon, thirty Latin, five Greek, and only five a combination of other languages, including Norman-French and French. ”

“ In France and Italy many business men are able to discuss art, literature and music on the same level with the masters. The Latin races and the Celtic races possess a culture that can be traced back for two or three thousand years, but Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the Saxon invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the mushrooms of our civilization. They were a stolid business people who lacked creative genius.
The outstanding intellect of England today is Celtic. ”

“ The Old English race grew by the absorption into it of tribal people descended from various ancient races. It assimilated to a great extent their dialects, and the Old English speech, as it prevailed in various parts of England, was formed by this process. No example of an Anglo-Saxon language has even been found out of Britain itself. ”

“ Our whole conception of the Anglo-Saxon kingship will be profoundly affected by our attribution or our denial to the king of an alienable superiority over villages that are full of free landowners. This question, therefore, we should have upon our hands even if we thought that we could rear the fabric of political and constitutional history without first laying an economic foundation. ”

“ It has also been the fashion to ignore the influence of five hundred years' contact between Roman civilization and the Saxon inhabitants of Great Britain. Surely great influences have been brought to bear upon the Anglo-Saxon race. That the making of England was more significant to the world and more valuable than any manifestation of Norman ability, is in one way true, but let us never forget that much that has been best in English national life has come from the Norman elements of it rather than the Saxon. ”

“ In England the petty kingdoms of the Heptarchy were in the course of formation, and though, when viewed closely, we seemed a divided and even hostile collection of individual tribes, the historian combines the separate elements, and tells us that, before the fifth century expired, another branch of the barbarians had settled into form and order, and that the Anglo-Saxon race had taken possession of its place. ”

“ Yet, remembering that we have dwelling close beside us and mingling their blood with ours a gallant little people who own no descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and remembering also how magical was the effect on all the barbarian races, of contact with the all-transmuting civilisation of Rome, we cannot surely leave altogether untold the story of those five centuries during which our country was known to the rest of Europe not as Anglia but as Britannia. ”

“ The persistence of the strong shows itself in the prevalence of the leading qualities of her dominant strains of blood, and it is well for England that her gentle blood flows in all her ranks and in all her classes. When we consider with Demolins 'what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon,' we shall find his descent from the old nobility, 'Saxon and Norman and Dane,' not the least of its factors. ”

“ Like the bards of the Britons, they celebrated the deeds of the great and brave in heroic poems, which were sung to the sounds of the lyre or the harp. After the conquest of Britain by the Saxons, these minstrels remained in high favour among the people, and were received with respect and veneration in the courts of kings and the halls of the nobles. In the Anglo-Saxon language they were known by two appellations, the one equivalent to the English word, glee-men, or merry-makers, and the other harpers, derived from the instrument on which they usually played. ”

“ William of Malmesbury tells us that the great distinction between the Anglo-Saxon nobility and the French or Normans was, that the latter built magnificent and stately castles; whereas the former consumed their immense fortunes in riotous hospitality, and in mean houses. We may thence infer that the arts in general were much less advanced in England than in France.
The lower ranks of freemen were the ceorles or husbandmen, employed in cultivating the farms of the nobles or thanes ”

“ The Anglo-Saxon system is an intermediate stage between Roman individualism and Celtic communalism. No wonder that the Saxons, who at home followed a system closely resembling the Celtic, modified it when they got acquainted with Roman forms and entered into their Roman inheritance in Great Britain.15 The mixed organisation of the township was the result of the assimilation. ”

“ The consideration of the evidence that people of brunette complexions were among the Anglo-Saxon settlers in England leads on to that of people of a still darker hue, the dark, black, or brown-black settlers. ”