Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/343

Rh not only lived as early as the second century of the Christian era, but actually assisted (as Selden states in his "Appendix to Fleta") in the judicial administration of Britain, He was the contemporary, and doubtless the personal and professional friend, of the celebrated prætorian-prefect Papinian, himself the most distinguished lawyer of his age, and chief administrator, in the year 210, of the Roman government at York, Selden glowingly depicts the judicial illumination of that early British age, as flourishing alike under the "Jus Cæsareum," the imperial law, and its able administration by those two most accomplished and illustrious Romans, "viri peritissimi, illustrissimique è Romanis.—(Selden's "Appendix to Fleta," p, 478.)

Nor is there any reason to believe that the Romanized British, when released, in the fifth century, from their political allegiance to the empire, abandoned the civilization, or abrogated the laws or usages which they had so long enjoyed; still less that they would seek or desire, in any way, to withdraw from their sepulchres and graves the protection which those laws had so fully secured. There is not a shadow of historical evidence that, under the Saxon invaders, who succeeded the Roman governors, any less respect was shown for the buried dead. On the contrary, it is distinctly shown by the Scandinavian historians, that these partially civilized Saxons had been specially taught to reverence their places of burial by their great leader Odin, the father of Scandinavian letters, distinguished for his eloquence and persuasive power, and especially commemorated as being the first to introduce the custom of erecting gravestones in honor of the dead.

In the dim and flickering light by which we trace the laws of these long-buried ages, the fact is significant and instructive that, of the several founders of the seven little Saxon kingdoms constituting the Heptarchy, nearly all deduced their descent, more or less remotely, from Odin himself. Hengist, who led the Saxon forces into Britain, and became first King of Kent, claimed with peculiar pride to be his great-grandson—rendering it quite improbable that during the rule of himself or his race, or that of his kindred sovereigns, which lasted from three to four hundred years, Saxonized Britain learned to abandon its buried ancestors, or hold them, in law, "nullius in bonis."

Nor do we find, in the occasional inroads of the Danes temporarily disturbing the Saxon governments of England, any evidence that they obliterated, in the slightest degree, the reverential usages in the matter of the dead, coming down from Odin. The early laws of that rude people, carefully collected in the twelfth century by the learned antiquary Saxo Grammaticus, speak with abhorrence of those who insult the ashes of the dead, not only denouncing death upon the "alieni corruptor cineris," but condemning the body of the offender to lie forever unburied and unhonored.—("Law of Frotho," Saxo Grammaticus, lib. v.)