Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/278

Rh 260 ENGLAND [HISTORY. later they exchanged their own speech for the speech of Rome, and were gradually lost among the mass of the Roman inhabitants. These processes were quicker or slower according to circumstances. They were quicker where the Goths in Spain or the Burgundians in Gaul were altogether isolated and cut off from their old homes. They were slower where, as in the case of the Franks, the settlements of the conquerors on Roman ground were continuous with their former possessions in the unconquered Teutonic land. But sooner or later, more or less completely, the same causes led to the same results. Wherever the Teutons settled within the empire, they neither exterminated nor assimilated the Roman inhabitants. They were in the end assimilated by them, though, of course, in the process of such assimilation, the Roman inhabitants themselves under went a certain degree of modification, greater or less, accord ing to circumstances. Thus both France and Italy are Roman lands, with a certain infused Teutonic element. But for the same reasons which made assimilation in Gaul slower than in Italy, the infused Teutonic element is much greater in France than it is in Italy. Different The case of the Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain charac- was altogether different. They came from lands which m r,. had been altogether untouched by the Roman power, and conquest where the arts, the language, and the religion of Rome of were altogether unknown. They had never been Roman Britain, subjects, Roman soldiers, or even Roman allies. They had received no grants from Roman princes, nor had their chiefs been honoured with Roman titles. They were, in short, altogether free from Roman influences. They had no share in that reverence for Rome and all that belonged to her that had so deep an effect on all who came within the range of her magic power. They came not, like the conquerors of the continental provinces, as disciples of a civilization which they revered, but simply as destroyers of a civilization of which they knew nothing. The conquerors of the con tinental provinces, themselves already half Romanized, settled in lauds which were still thoroughly Roman. The conquerors of Britain, themselves untouched by the slightest Roman influence, settled in a land where Roman influences had already begun to die out. From this wide difference in the circumstances both of conquerors and the conquered, as compared with the circumstances of conqueror and con- qu3red in other countries, it followed that the English con quest of Britain had a character altogether different from the Teutonic conquest of any other Roman province. A people wholly ignorant of Roman culture, coming by sea, and therefore utterly cut olf from their own homes, were of themselves disposed to act as destroyers in a way in which the Teutonic invaders elsewhere were not. They were also, as it were, compelled to act as destroyers by the circumstances of the land into which they entered. They met with an amount of resistance, of steady national resistance, such as Goths, Franks, and Burgundians nowhere met with. They had to win the land bit by bit by hard fighting ; their advance was often checked by victories on the part of the Britons, or delayed by periods of mere ex haustion and inaction. Their conquest thus took a character of extermination, of complete displacement of one people by another, which was not taken by the Teutonic conquests elsewhere. The English could not, like their fellows on the continent, sit quietly down as the ruling order among a people who for the most part easily submitted, and who therefore kept their lives, their laws, their religion, and a share of their property. The determined resistance of the Britons made it a struggle for life and death on both sides. On the one hand, it made death or personal slavery the only alternatives for the conquered within the conquered territory. On the other hand, the gradual nature of the conquest gave the coaquered in one district every opportunity of escaping into the districts which were still unconquered. There can be no reasonable doubt that the English conquest, in those parts of Britain which were conquered while the English still remained heathens, came as near to a conquest of extermination, to a general killing or driving out of the earlier inhabitants, as was possible in the nature of the case. A complete physical extermination, the killing or driving out of every individual of a whole people, is a thing which cannot take place, except in the case of some utterly helpless tribe attacked by a people immeasurably superior to them in physical resources. Even in such cases it commonly happens that the savage is not, strictly speaking, exterminated by the civilized man ; he rather dies out before him. Still less could complete physical extinction take place with a people in the condition of the Britons at the English landing. la the course of the English con quest we may be sure that the alternative of death or flight was the ordinary rule ; but we may be equally sure that the rule had its exceptions. The women could be largely spared ; even men would sometimes be allowed to escape death at the price of slavery. It might even happen that here and there someof the conquered might make terms with the conquerors, and might be admitted to their fellowship. In all these ways it follows that, physically and genea logically, there is a British element in the English nation, even in the most strictly Teutonic parts of England. No nation is of perfectly pure blood, and the English nation is no exception to the rule. The point is that the British infusion was not large enough to have any perceptible effect on the national being of England. The smaller Celtic infusion was assimilated into the greater Teutonic mass. In the sense of the physiologist or the genealogist, the English nation is not purely Teutonic ; but then in their sense no nation is purely anything. The point is that the English people are as strictly Teutonic as the High-Germans are Teutonic, or as the Britons themselves were Celtic. This or that Englishman may conceivably have had British fore fathers, as this or that High-German may conceivably have had Slavonic forefathers, as this or that Briton may con ceivably have had Basque forefathers ; but to speak of the Britons as the forefathers of the English nation as a nation is as misleading as it would be to speak of the Slaves as the forefathers of the German nation, or of the Basques as the forefathers of the British nation. One nation displaced another ; the English displaced the Britons. One system of law, language, and religion gave way to another system of law, language, and religion. The English swept away all that was Roman or British from the soil of the land which they made English, as thoroughly as the Saracens swept away all that was Roman fr Jin the soil of Africa. Yet we may be quite certain that in both cases some slaves and rensgades here and there conformed to the new state of things. The only point is that they were not in such numbers as to be of the slightest historical importance, not in such numbers as to work any practical modification of the general mass in which they lost themselves. A new people thus settled in the land, a people who displaced, as far as their complete conquest reached, its earlier inhabitants. From each successive district that was subdued all traces of the old state of things passed away, except a few of the gigantic works of^ Roman engineering skill. The old language passed away ; English displaced Welsh as the language of every district which the English occupied. And the language of the con querors, in thus displacing the language of the conquered, was hardly at all modified by it; a few Welsh and a very few Latin words were all that crept into English at this stage. The old local nomenclature passed away, except in the case of a few great cities and a few great [ natural objects. London on the Thames and Gloucester Exter- niinath charact of the conquei The En lish dis place tl Britons