Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/276

Rh 264 ENGLAND [HISTOKY. Survival of the Welsh lan guage. Insular position nf Bri tain. that they were a people who had been less modified by Roman influences than the inhabitants of the other provinces of the empire. This is shown by the fact that the ancient British language survived the &quot;Roman Conquest, and still remains the language of a not inconsiderable part of the isle of Britain. The mere fact of the existence of the Welsh language shows that Roman influences could not have been so strong in Britain as they were in Gaul and Spain. The military conquest and the political occupation were no doubt as complete in Britain as in any other province of the Roman empire ; but the moral and social influence of Rome must have been less than it was elsewhere. In Gaul and Spain the inhabitants adopted the name, the feelings, and the speech of Rome, and banded on their Roman speech to their Teutonic conquerors. The difference between the phenomena of Britain and the phenomena of the continental provinces is plain at a glance. The speech of Gaul and Spain at this day is Latin ; the exceptions are only where the earlier languages survive in obscure corners. In the lands which formed the Roman province of Britain a Latin speech is now nowhere spoken, nor is there any sign that a Latin speech has ever been spoken as the popular language at any time since the withdrawal of the Roman legions. The dominant tongue is that of the Teutonic conquerors ; but part of the island, a part somewhat more than a mere corner, keeps its ancient British speech. The Roman tongue, dominant and more than dominant in Gaul and Spain, has in Britain no place at all. Britain then, even if the Roman legions had not been deliberately withdrawn from it, was, at the beginning of the fifth century, in quite another case from the other provinces of the empire. Mere conquest had been as thorough as in any other frontier province ; for it must not, be forgotten that Britain was pre-eminently a frontier province. As the whole of Britain was never subdued, the part which was subdued always remained, like the lands on the Rhine and the Danube, exposed to the attacks of the still independent inhabitants of the island. But the usual results of Roman conquest, social and national assimilation, had been much less thorough than elsewhere even in the frontier provinces. One main cause of this difference doubtless was the geographical position of the country. A large island, an island large enough to have a separate being of its own, is far harder to incorporate or assimilate than a land which is geographically continuous with the ruling country. The history of the greater Mediterranean islands proves this, and it is still more true of great oceanic islands like our own. The British islands seem designed to form one political whole ; yet it has been found impossible to unite Ireland with Great Britain in the same way in which the different parts of Great Britain have been united with one another. Britain, the most distant and geographically the most distinct of the provinces of Rome, was felt to be, and was constantly spoken of as, another world. In all ages and among all changes of inhabitants, the insular character of Britain has been one of the ruling facts of its history. Its people, of whatever race or speech, whatever their political condition at home or their political relation to other countries, have been before all things pre-eminently islanders. This must be borne in mind through the whole of British history. We are not dealing with Celts, Romans, Teutons, simply as such, but with Celts, Romans, Teutons, modified by the fact that they dwelled in a great island, which was cut off in many ways from the rest of the world, and which acted in many things as a separate world of itself. The result of this insular position of Britain was shown in many things during the time of the Roman dominion. It was remarked that no province of the empire was so fertile in tyrants. That is to say, no part of the empire The produced GO many of those military chiefs who, by the tyrants, favour of their armies, sometimes it would seem with the ood will of the inhabitants of the provinces, set them selves up as opposition emperors, in revolt against the acknowledged prince who reigned in the Old or the New Rome, at Milan or at Ravenna. The position of these tyrants must not be misunderstood, as if they at all con sciously aimed at the foundation of national kingdoms. Their object was not to lop off a province from the empire, and to form it into an independent state. Their object was the empire itself, the whole if they could get it ; if not, as large a share of it as their forces would allow them to hold. An emperor who ruled in Britain was anxious, if he could, to rule also in Gaul, to rule also in Italy. But the geographical necessities of the case stepped in, and often con fined the emperors who arose in Britain to a purely insular dominion. That dominion was more easily won, and more easily kept as a practically distinct power, than the dominion of any of the continental provinces. It was again doubtless Britain due to the geographical position of Britain that it was the one 8 iven U P province of the West from which the legions were deliberately R J 1 withdrawn. They were withdrawn from one world to another. The Roman world, it seemed, might exist without the dominion of the British world. The deliberate surrender of Gaul or Spain or Africa would have been quite another matter. Those lands had become in every sense members of the Roman world, and the voluntary lopping off of any one of those members would have been an act of suicide which no one would have dreamed of. With the great island it was otherwise. While the other provinces were cut off from the empire by open or disguised foreign inva sion, Britain was voluntarily given up. It was doubtless given up through fear of foreign invasion, through a feeling of inability to withstand foreign invasion; but not as the direct result of foreign invasion itself. We may believe that suc cessive Teutonic inroads had so weakened the Roman power in Britain that it was felt hopeless to attempt to keep the province any longer. But the actual Teutonic con querors of the island found the Roman legions already gone. Britain was won by the English, not from Roman legions or from Roman provincials, but from men who had been Roman provincials, but who, on the withdrawal of the Roman legions, hid changed into an independent British people. It is however to be borne in mind that the independence in possession of which the Britons were found by their English conquerors was an independence which had been thrust upon them. No province of the empire separated itself from the empire of its own free will. Britain would have had, on every geographical and national ground, more temptation so to do than any other province of the We-.it. But Britain did not, any more than any other province of the West, seek for independence of Rome. The forsaken people, left to themselves, cried to their masters to come back to be their helpers ; but the groans of the Britons fell in vain on the ears of Aetius. He could deliver Gaul from the Hun ; he felt no call to deliver Britain from the Pict or the Saxon. The inhabi tants of the Roman province of Britain were left to defend Britain themselves how they could, against the incursions alike of left inde- their neighbours in those parts of their island whieh Rome pen had never subdued, and of the more dangerous Teutonic invaders from beyond the sea. Thus forsaken by Rome, they seem to have tried to keep up some shadow of a Roman dominion among themselves. Their chiefs bore Roman titles; a tradition of imperial succession was kept up among the reputed descendants of the tyrant Maximus. So the first British prince whom history or legend brings into personal contact with the Teutonic invaders appears in the earliest versions of the tale, not as a British king,