Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/392

 that "King Ethelbert built the church of St. Paul, in the city of London, where he and his successors should have their episcopal see."

That the Britons then possessed no naval force fitted to compete with the Saxons is clear, from the fact that their contests with them were invariably carried on by land, and that no effectual resistance by sea was offered to the vast numbers of Saxons and Angles who poured into the island. It is, indeed, not improbable that the Romans, when they assumed the government of Britain, discouraged the inhabitants from the creation of a fleet, which might endanger their possession of the island, a fact which would naturally account for the inferiority of the Britons when matched against invaders, who, from the nature of their previous lives, were more at home on the sea than on land.

One only of the kings of the Heptarchy, Offa of Mercia, exerted himself to resuscitate the declining trade and commerce of Britain. Offa, having in view the raising of a naval force to defend his dominions, encouraged his subjects to fit out ships, and to carry goods in their own bottoms instead of trusting for transport to so large an extent as they had hitherto done, to the vessels of foreign nations. But his praiseworthy efforts were only transient in their character. Some of the English traders who resorted to the continent (including Rome and Venice), in order to evade payment of the customs exacted from them in their transit through France, pretended to be pilgrims on their journey to the