Page:1909historyofdec04gibbuoft.djvu/202

 170 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xxxviii warlike subjects are said to have been ignorant of the use, and even of the form, of an horse ; but she boldly sailed from Britain to the mouth of the Ehine, with a fleet of four hundred ships and an army of one hundred thousand men. After the loss of a battle, the captive Badiger implored the mercy of his victorious bride, who generously pardoned his offence, dismissed her rival, and compelled the king of the Varni to discharge with honour and fidelity the duties of an husband. 170 This gallant exploit appears to be the last naval enterprise of the Anglo-Saxons. The arts of navigation, by which they had acquired the empire of Britain and of the sea, were soon neglected by the indolent Barbarians, who supinely renounced all the commercial advan- tages of their insular situation. Seven m independent kingdoms were agitated by perpetual discord ; and the British world was seldom connected, either in peace or war, with the nations of the continent. 172 Fan of the I have now accomplished the laborious narrative of the sire in the decline and fall of the Boman empire, from the fortunate age of Trajan and the Antonines to its total extinction in the West about five centuries after the Christian aera. At that unhappy period, the Saxons fiercely struggled with the natives for the possession of Britain ; Gaul and Spain were divided between the powerful monarchies of the Franks and Visigoths, and the dependent kingdoms of the Suevi and Burgundians ; Africa was exposed to the cruel persecution of the Vandals and the savage insults of the Moors ; Borne and Italy, as far as the banks of 170 Perhaps she was the sister of one of the princes or chiefs of the Angles, who landed in 527 and the following years between the Humber and the Thames, and gradually founded the kingdoms of East Anglia and Mercia. The English writers are ignorant of her name and existence ; but Procopius may have suggested to Mr. Rowe the character and situation of Rodugune in the tragedy of the Eoyal Convert. 171 [•<« The old notion of an Heptarchy, of a regular system of seven kingdoms, united under the regular supremacy of a single over-lord, is a dream which has passed away before the light of historic criticism. The English kingdoms in Britain were ever fluctuating, alike in their number and in their relations to one another. The number of perfectly independent states was sometimes greater and sometimes less than the mystical seven. . . . Yet it is no less certain that, among the mass of smaller and more obscure principalities, seven kingdoms do stand out in a marked way,. . . seven kingdoms which alone supplied candidates for the dominion of the whole island." Freeman, Norman Conquest, i. p. 23.] 172 In the copious history of Gregory of Tours, we cannot find any traces of hostile or friendly intercourse between France and England, except in the marriage of the daughter of Caribert, king of Paris, quam regis cujusdam in Cantia [leg. in Cantia regis cuiusdam] Alius matrimonio copulavit (1. ix. c. 26, in torn. ii. p. 348). The bishop of Tours ended his history and his life almost immediately before the conversion of Kent.