Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/279

Rh THE ENGLISH CONQUEST.] ENGLAND 267 jaeEng jih con- iiest a jtatlicn jn-
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rison th the icnish dDan &amp;gt;ian ids. on the Severn keep their British names; but the names of the vast mass of the towns and villages of England are purely English. The only exceptions are in the districts which were won from the Briton at a later stage of conquest, and in those districts which, through the working of later events, came largely to exchange their English nomenclature for a Danish one. But the English and the Danish nomenclature mark two successive waves of Teutonic conquest; they make one whole as opposed to anything Roman or British. The change of nomenclature shows how complete the change of occupants was ; the land was settled and divided afresh, and each place received a new name in the language of the new settlers. The settlers brought with them their own territorial and tribal divisions, their own laws or customs, their own religion. No feature of primitive English law or custom can be shown with the slightest probability to be derived from a Roman or British source. And nowhere, at this stage, within the conquered districts did conquerors and conquered live on side by side, each making use of its own law, as so largely happened in the Teutonic conquests on the continent. That English terri torial divisions often represent the earlier divisions of the conquered people is far more likely. The territory won by a particular battle would naturally answer to the territory of the tribe which was overthrown in that battle. And where earlier divisions were made convenient by any thing in the physical conformation of the country, the same reason which had already fixed the boundary would lead the new settlers to fix it again at the same points as before. But everything else passed away. Kent alone, of the great divisions of south-eastern Britain, kept its name through all conquests. But it passed on its name to a new race of Kentishmen, Cantwaru, alien in blood, speech, law, and fuith to the British Cantii whom they displaced. That the new comers were alien in faith is perhaps after all the greatest and most important point of difference between the English conquest and the other Teutonic conquests. Of all the Teutonic conquerors of lands which were or had been Roman, the English alone entered the land as heathens and abode in it as heathens. The religious history of Roman Britain is a most mysterious subject; but there can be no doubt that there was an organized Christian church in the island at the time of the English invasion. And, as fur as we can see, it would seem that, at least within the former Roman province, the profession of Christianity was univer sal; there is no sign that aught of old British or Roman idolatry still lived on. On this Christian land and this Christian people came the destroying scourge of a heathen con quest. Our one record of the time, the lament of Gildas, brings out this feature in the strongest light. As afterwards, when the Christian English came under the scourge of the heathen Dane, so now, when the Christian Briton came under the scourge of the heathen English, the churches and clergy were the foremost objects of the destroying fury of the invaders. During the first hundred and fifty years of Eng lish settlement in Britain, English conquest meant heathen conquest ; English rule meant heathen rule. Christianity, its ministers, its professors, its temples, were thoroughly swept away before the inroad of Teutonic heathendom. In. all these ways then the English conquest of Britain stands apart by itself, as something differing in all its main features from the common race of the Teutonic conquests elsewhere. There are only two parts of Western Europe which present phenomena which are at all like those of our own island. These are those parts of Germany which lie on the left bank of the Rhine and on the right bank of the Danube. There, as in Britain, a land that w.as Roman ceased to be Roman. The speech, the laws, and the manners of Germany displaced those of Rome. Thus far the case of these lands resembles the case of Britain, and n unlike the caso of Italy, Spain, and the rest of Gaul. But their case differed in this, that the Rhenish and Danubian lands lay adjoining to the unconquered Teu tonic lands ; they were the lands which were specially exposed to Teutonic inroads. The earliest inroads of the invaders would naturally be of a more devastating kind than those which followed. It would largely be in the course of their earliest inroads that they picked up that amount of Roman culture which made the second stage of their inroads less devastating. And after all, the amount of havoc could not have been equal to the amount of havoc which was done in Britain, as most of the Roman cities lived through the storm and kept their Roman names. And in the lands west of the Rhine, in those German lands which formed part of the Roman province of Gaul, the Teutonic invaders were but winning back an old Teutonic land. It is possible that some traces of Teutonic speech and feeling may have still lingered on to make the progress of the invaders more easy. And in these lands, above all, the Roman inha bitants had the fullest means of withdrawing into the unsub dued part of the province. As long as the Teuton was a mere destroyer, they would naturally seek shelter in the lands which were still untouched. As soon as he became only a conqueror, and not a mere destroyer, they would find it more to their interest to submit. In Britain it was not till a much later stage, not till the greater part of his con quests were made, that the Teutonic conqueror began to carry on his conquests in such a fashion as to make it the interest of the conqtiered to submit rather than to flee. Such then was the general nature of the Teutonic con quest of the greater part of Britain, the conquest which changed so great a part of Britain into England. It was a destroying conquest which swept away the former inhabi tants and their whole political system. It was specially a heathen conquest, which utterly rooted up Christianity from a land where it must have already taken deep root. It was a gradual conquest, spread over several centuries, a conquest in which the conquerors had to win each step by hard fighting against the earlier inhabitants. Lastly, it was a conquest which never was completed, which never spread over the whole island. Leaving for the present purely political questions about homage and supremacy, it is plain that there is a large part of Britain which remained un touched by the English occupation, and where the ancient inhabitants, their language, laws, and manners still lived on. And it may be added that, in some districts to which English occupation did extend, in those conquests namely which were the latest in date, the character of the conquest greatly changed from what it had been in its earlier stages. It seemed well fully to set forth the nature of the con- The Low- quest before giving any detailed account of the former con- IMch dition of the conquerors, or any direct narrative of their ri, &amp;gt;e .^. TT J tl &amp;lt;- ail(1 tllCir conquest. Having cleared the ground irom misconceptions, la it will be easier to tell the tale simply and clearly. The Teutonic conquerors of Britain then were the Low-Dutch 1 tribes from the border-lands of Germany and Scandinavia, the lauds from the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser. Their dialects form a branch of the Teutonic speech distinct from the High-Dutch dialects spoken to the south of them. Their own speech must not be looked on as in any sense a corruption of the High-Dutch, but as a perfectly independ ent and coequal branch of the great Teutonic family, as old 1 Dutch is the English form of Theotiscus, the tnier Latin name of the German nation, of which Deutsch in its various spellings is the native form. This wider use of the word has hardly ceased in America, and in England the name, with its two divisions of ffii/h hutch and Line- butch, was ia familiar use down to the beginning of the last century.