East of England

“ Of our last day’s wanderings I have already told in my chapter on East Anglia.
Travel-stained but unwearied, the tried and trusty companion of our pilgrimage stands before our London hotel. It is hard to think of her—is the pronoun right?—as a thing of iron and steel; [Pg 378] she has won a personality to us; but, metaphor aside, what a splendid means to a splendid end the motor has become! In two summers we have seen more of Britain than one might find it practicable to see in years under old conditions, and we have seen the most delightful, though unfamiliar, side. ”

“ Men talk of the bazaars of the East—I have never seen them—but I dare say that, compared with thee, they are poor places, silent places, abounding with empty boxes, O thou pride of London’s east!—mighty mart of old renown!—for thou art not a place of yesterday:—long before the Roses red and white battled in fair England, thou didst exist—a place of throng and bustle—a place of gold and silver, perfumes and fine linen. Centuries ago thou couldst extort the praises even of the fiercest foes of England. Fierce bards of Wales, sworn foes of England, sang thy praises centuries ago ”

“ There is a third country in Europe in which the "Eastern" view is as forcibly put and as deeply understood as the "Western," a third border country—England. England, particularly in those of her racial elements conventionally named Celtic, is closely in sympathy with the "East." ”

“ On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our view the rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to speak as though we imagined that a general theory of English history can neglect the East of England. ”

“ The son of Penda officiated as godfather to the new convert, whose example in accepting the Christian faith was followed by many of his thanes and soldiers, but not as yet by the bulk of the South Saxon people.
3. Of political events in the kingdom of the East Angles in the period now under review, we find scarcely a trace. Shut off from the rest of England by the great fen-lands, which covered almost the whole of the modern counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, East Anglia seems to have generally kept the even tenour of her own solitary way, which was at this time the way of holiness. ”

“ Throughout the Lowlands, the people, both in personal appearance and character, very much resemble the inhabitants of the north of England. This is particularly the case with the inhabitants of the southern borders, between the Cheviot Hills and the Firths of Clyde and Forth. The same light-coloured hair and the same frame of body, which, in the north of England, remind us of the people’s descent from the Scandinavians, indicate here also considerable immigrations of that people into the southern part of Scotland, and thence farther up along the east coast. ”

“ He had not progressed far before he had become impressed with the backwardness of England in Western occupation since the discovery of the North American continent under her auspices in 1497 and 1498. Great deeds had been performed by intrepid English explorers to the North and Northeast, and English commerce had been advanced in the rich regions of the East; but on the Western continent no further attempt of moment toward exploration or settlement had been made by Englishmen from the finish of Henry the seventh’s reign to Elizabeth’s time. ”

“ The whole coast of England is surrounded by a general “shake hands.” The coast-guard on their wintry walks do not greet each other more surely than old friends all over England do: one clasps another, and another a third, till from Dover to London and so on to York, from Yarmouth on the east to Bristol on the west, from John O’Groat’s house at the extreme north to the Land’s End, the very toe-nail of England on the south—a kindly greeting, we may be sure, will pass. ”

“ The conquest of Britain was at last over. The wall of Hadrian remained for nearly two hundred years more the northern limit of Roman power in the extreme west.
II. The Province of Britain and its Military System.—Geographically, Britain consists of two parts: (1) the comparatively flat lowlands of the south, east and midlands, suitable to agriculture and open to easy intercourse with the continent, i.e. with the rest of the Roman empire; (2) the district consisting of the hills of Devon and Cornwall, of Wales and of northern England, regions lying more, and often very much more, than 600 ft. ”

“ Italy, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria have gained more in proportion than we have. In the olden days, when all the trade with the East came to Europe viâ the Cape, England was the great centre of the world. ”

“ Accordingly, as Richard advanced into Scotland by Berwick and the east coast, the Scots, accompanied by the French, poured 30,000 men into England by the west, and, ravaging Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire, collected a splendid booty, and returned well satisfied to their country. ”

“ Passing over some important events, among them the brave defence of East Anglia by its ealdorman Ulfcytel (“No worse hand-play did the Danes ever meet with from Englishmen than that which Ulfcytel gave them”) , we come to the year 1008, for which the Chronicle gives us the following important but perplexing entry: “Now the king bade that through all England men should regularly build ships, that is for 300 hides ... and for 10 hides a skiff, and for 8 hides a helmet and coat of mail”. ”

“ One body, conquering the Britons in the East, and settling there, called their kingdom Essex; another body settled in the West, and called their kingdom Wessex; the Northfolk, or Norfolk people, established themselves in one place; the Southfolk, or Suffolk people, established themselves in another; and gradually seven kingdoms or states arose in England, which were called the Saxon Heptarchy. The poor Britons, falling back before these crowds of fighting men whom they had innocently invited over as friends, retired into Wales and the adjacent country; into Devonshire, and into Cornwall. ”

“ In the Norman expeditions the North, mighty in its heathenism, poured forth towards the east, the west, and the south, its numerous warriors and shrewd men, who subverted old kingdoms, and founded new and powerful ones in their place. It was by Danish and Norwegian fleets that Normandy and England were then conquered, and kingdoms won in Scotland, Ireland, and North Holland ”

“ To such base uses all things return at last; dust unto dust, when the life has died out of them, and the living world needs their companionship no longer.
On leaving Oxford, the visitors spread over England, north, south, east, and west. We trace Legh in rapid progress through Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincoln, Yorkshire, and Northumberland; Leyton through Middlesex, Kent, Sussex, Hants, Somersetshire, and Devon. ”

“ The center of the land hemisphere is in the northwest of Europe, at a point near southeast of England, the northeast of France, and the coast of Holland. The dwellers around the North Sea are the antipodes of the New Zealanders. Great Britain is the country which, as a whole, is the middle point of the continental world. ”

“ Moreover, if we consider what an immense number of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Jews, and others, have, particularly during later centuries, immigrated into England, where they have settled, and by degrees married natives; and, lastly, if we remember that most foreigners have settled on the east coast, or in the midland and north-eastern districts ”

“ If the first batch of battles occurred in the north, it is fair to assume that they were fought against the Angles, and this practically fixes them in the north-east. There is good reason for believing that the Angles had very early established themselves in this quarter. ”

“ The counties occupied by the Danes and Norwegians, viz., Northumberland, Durham, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire, are not mentioned in Domesday-Book. In the other fifteen counties to the north and east of Watlinga-Stræt, the “Sochmanni” and “liberi homines” are summed up as follows (see Turner’s “History of the Anglo-Saxons”) :—
The so-called “freemen” (liberi homines) , who, it may be assumed, most resembled our freeholders, seem from this to have been principally confined to Essex (306) and the ancient East Anglia, or Norfolk and Suffolk (together, 12,993) . ”

“ England is beautiful by copse and hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep, deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of northern France—though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it. Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery, have made England what she is—the garden of Europe. ”

“ To them it seemed a toy landscape for children to play with, but, as they passed through the big towns and cities with their tall, clustering chimneys, their crowding populations, with unmistakable evidences of great wealth, their shipping, where the harbours bit into the red coast line, there began to waken in them the thought that this tiny England, so beautifully finished, and so neatly adorned, was something mightier than they had ever known. ”

“ From north to south, six thousand miles heave white with ocean foam,
Between the dear old land we've left and this our new-found home;
Yet what though ocean stretch between—though here this hour we
stand!
Our hearts, thank God! are English still; God bless the dear old
land!
"To England!" men, a bumper brim; up, brothers, glass in hand!
"England!" I give you "England!" boys; "God bless the dear old land!" ”

“ But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? ”

“ Not the least interesting feature of the century of which we have treated was the gradual growth of these English communities in the East which in some cases formed the germs of the great ports and cities of our own time. ”

“ The dominion of the English kings on the continent is of the highest European moment, but, from its geographical side, it is Gaul and not Britain which it affects. ♦English settlements beyond sea.♦ The really great geographical phænomenon of English history is that which it shares with Spain and Portugal, and in which it surpasses both. This is the vast extent of outlying English dominion and settlement, partly in Europe, but far more largely in the distant lands of Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. But it is not merely that England has become a great power in all quarters of the world ”

“ The population was sparse, ignorant, and unprosperous. It was in the south that improvements originated. In the reign of Henry VIII, the North fought against the dissolution of the monasteries (SS352, 357) ; in Elizabeth's reign it resisted Protestantism; in that of George I it sided with the so-called "Pretender" (S535) .
But steam transformed an immense area. Factories were built, population increased, cities sprang up, and wealth grew apace. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester, Sheffield, and Liverpool made the North a new country. (See Industrial Map of England, p.10.) ”

“ Southeastward we have the whole level country of England, comprising the plain of York, the great central plateau, the Fen district and the eastern counties, the valley of the Thames, and the watershed of the south coast. ”

“ And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past forty-eight hours.
England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh, Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's heel—that ancient England slept. ”

“ I say the South is the enemy of the North. England is the rival of the North, a powerful rival, often dangerous; sometimes a mean and dishonourable rival. But the South is our foe,—far more dangerous, meaner, and more dishonourable. England keeps treaties ; the South breaks faith. ”

“ For the physical geography of a country always has a great effect upon its political history, and the dispersions and movements of different nations are exactly those parts of history which have most to do with fixing the names and the boundaries of different countries at different times. England, for instance, is, in strictness, the land of the English wherever they may settle, whether in their old home on the European continent, or in the isle of Britain, or in New England beyond the Ocean. ”

“ Never perhaps in the centuries, for when in the centuries has that element been so ruthlessly consumed? England is like a swimmer who has carried the lifeline to shore, battling amid the breakers, tossed high on their crests, hurled into their green depths, pounded, battered, blinded, until he lies, a broken thing, on the shore. ”

“ W. 3. c. 44. as requires that Goods of Private Traders imported into England or Wales, should be sold by Inch of Candle, repealed.XXII. And be it further enacted, That so much of the said Act of the Ninth Year of the Reign of King William the Third, or of any other Act or Acts, as requires that all Goods-and Merchandize belonging to any Private Trader to the East Indies, which shall be imported into England or Wales, shall be sold openly and publickly by Inch of Candle, shall be and the same is hereby repealed. ”