Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/286

Rh 272 ENGLAND [HISTORY, Effects of not stop warfare, whether between Englishman and Briton Chris- or between Englishman and Englishman. It did not stop tianity. a gg ress j ve conquest at the cost of either kinsmen or strangers. But it so far humanized its new converts that warfare ceased to be exterminating. Conquest now meant political subjugation and, for a while, social degradation. It no longer meant the more frightful alternatives of death, flight, or personal slavery. The lands won by the English up to this date must be looked on as having become purely Teutonic. The Britons were swept away as nearly as a people can be swept away. The lands conquered after this time must be looked on as lands in which the dominant Teuton has largely assimilated his Celtic subjects. The process has gone on from that day to this, and it goes on still. Kent, the south-eastern peninsula, has been purely English for fourteen hundred years. Cornwall, the south western peninsula, has become fully English, even in speech, only within the memory of a generation which has hardly passed away. Thus, in the hundred and fifty-eight years which passed between the landing of Hengest and the victory of ^Ethelfrith, a large part of Britain had received another language, another religion, another system of law. Old things had passed away ; all things had become new. In the whole eastern part of the island, from the Forth to the English Channel, and through a great, though still somewhat undefined, central region, reaching at two points to the western seas, the Roman and the Briton had gone, and the Teuton had taken their place. Old-Eng- The three Low-Dutch tribes brought with them their form lish Ian- O f t ne common Teutonic language. Into that language a few Roman and a few British words crept from the begin ning. British slaves, British women, brought in a few humble words of domestic life. A few of the great works of Roman civilization, such as the conquerors had never seen in their own land, struck them with awe and wonder. For these they had no names in their own tongue; they therefore kept their Latin names in the English tongue. The words street, port, cliester, thus came into our language. Many of the great natural objects, most of the rivers, a few of the hills, kept their earlier names ; so did a few great cities. With these few exceptions, the vocabulary of the tongue which our fathers brought with them remained un- toached. It was enriched by a few new words to ex press new ideas, and that was all. Nothing happened till far later times to make any change in its character, its grammatical construction, its general stock of words. We brought with us our language, and with our language we brought with us the earliest monuments of its literature. We brought with us our English Iliad in the primaeval Song of Beowulf ; we brought with us our Homeric catalogue in the Song of th?, Traveller. Whether they were written or unwritten, whether they lived only in the memory or were graven with the primaeval runes, those songs were the work of Englishmen in days before a rood of British soil had become England. Nor need we doubt that the deeds of Hengest and Cerdic had already been graven on the primaeval beech, 1 while yet Englishmen knew no speech but English, and worshipped no god but Woden and his fellows. Before the Roman made his second appearance in this island, the national literature of Englishmen, the local litera ture of England, had begun. We thus brought with us into Britain that form of the common Aryan speech which had grown up among the tribes of northern Germany. Wherever, during the first hundred and fifty years of the English settlement, the English arms reached, there the tongue of Rome and the tongue of Britain passed away. Their place was taken by 1 Beech and book are the same word, just like the two senses of the Latin liber. Write is cognate with the High-Dutch reisscn, just like scribere with scroba. the speech which, with the changes that fourteen hundred years have wrought in it, still abides the speech of England. It has changed, as all other languages have changed. It has, like all other languages, so changed that its older forms cannot now be understood without special study; but it has never lost its unbroken personal being. The English tongue has never been displaced by any other tongue, as the tongue of the Briton was displaced by the tongue of the English. It has lived on, spoken in different local forms in different parts of the land, changing from age to age, losing old inflexions, taking in new words ; but it has changed simply as the nation itself has changed, without ceasing to be one and the same English nation ; it has changed, as each man in the nation himself changes in his passage from childhood to old age, without ceasing to be the same personal being in old agejwhich he was in childhood. And, with our form of the common Aryan language, The we brought with us our form of another common Aryan Teuto possession, which still abides, also unchanged in its personal P^*J identity, never displaced to make way for any other system, but which has gone through even greater and more constant changes than our spoken language. We brought with us our own political and social system ; that is, the form which the political and social system common to the whole Aryan family had taken among the tribes of northern Germany. A germ of political and social life was brought into Britain in the keels of Hengest, which, changing from genera tion to generation but never itself exchanged for any other system, borrowing from foreign sources but assimilating what it borrowed with its own essence, changing its out ward shape but abiding untouched in its true substance, has lived and grown through fourteen hundred years into the law, the constitution, the social being, of England. The earliest law or custom of England was the law or Effects custom of the old homes of the English settlers, with such conqui modifications as the settlement in a land beyond the sea )y 9ea could not fail to bring with it. These modifications, as v, moment s thought will show, must have been considerable. A conquest by land need not involve any sudden change ; it does not necessarily place the conqueror in any wholly new set of circumstances. It may well be a mere territorial advance, a mere addition of field to field, in which the last won territory does not call for any different treatment from the older territory immediately behind it. But a conquest by sea implies a breach of continuity ; the old land is necessarily forsaken, and a fresh start has to be made in a new one. The political society of the old home may be reproduced in the new ; but it is reproduced rather than continued, and it can hardly be reproduced without some measure of change. And a settlement made bit by bit, each step being won by hard fighting, such as was the English set tlement in Britain, will be affected by all such influences as are likely to ba strengthened by constant fighting for the possession of a new country. And in such a case, when the nation is an army in active service, when the chiefs of the nation are the leaders of that army, the influences which are most likely to be strengthened are those which tend ic, the direction of national unity. Or, what is almost the same thing, they are the influences which tend to strengthen the authority of the chiefs by whom the national unity is represented. The political and social state of the Low-DutcFi tribes at the time of their settlement in Britain was still essentially the primitive Teutonic democracy, the state of things described by Tacitus, and which still exists, modified of course in the lapse of ages, but untouched by any violent change, in some of the smaller and more primitive cantons of Switzerland. The family is at the root of everything. The hide of land, the portion supposed to be enough for the The hid maintenance 1 of a single family, is the lowest territorial unit.