CHAP. I. The England of from the changes wrought by the lapse of time and the different circumstances which surround each Ecgberht. generation, there can be no doubt that it has brought with it moral results in modifying the character of the nation. It is not without significance that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in their largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English borderland, in the forest of Arden. Character of the country. Side by side with this change in the character of its population had gone on a change in the character of the country itself. Its outer appearance indeed still remained much the same as in earlier days. Not half its soil had as yet been brought under tillage; as the traveller passed along its roads, vast reaches of forest, of moor, of fen, formed the main landscape before him ; even the open and tilled districts were broken everywhere by woods and thickets which the farmer needed for his homestead, for his fences, for his house-building, and his fire. But limited as was its cultivation. Britain was no longer the mere sheet of woodland and waste which the English had found it. Population had increased,1 and four hundred years of labour had done their work in widening the clearings and thinning the woods. We have already caught glimpses of such a work in the moorlands of the north, in the fens of the Wash, in the thickets of Arden, as the monk carried his axe into the forest, or the thegn planted tillers over the grants that had been 1 Lingard ("Ang.-Sax. Church," i. 185) infers this from the new upgrowth of churches. CHAP. I. The England of carved for him out of the waste "folk-land." The study of such a tract as the Andreds weald would show the same ceaseless struggle with nature-Sussex- Ecgberht, men and Surrey-men mounting over the Southdowns and the North-downs to hew their way forward to the future meeting of their shire-bounds in the heart of the Weald, while the vast herds of swine that formed the advance guard of the Cantwara who were cleaving their way westward along the Medway, pushed into the "dens" or glades in the woodland beyond. We can see the general results of this industrial Dorset. warfare in a single district, such as Dorset. When the English landed in Britain no tract was wilder or less civilized; its dense forest-reaches in fact checked the westward advance of the conquerors, and forced them to make their way slowly along the coast from the Stour to the Exe. Even when the Dorsætan were fairly settled there, the names of their hundreds and of the trysting-places of their courts show the wild state of the land. The hundred-moots gather at barrow or den, at burn or ford, in comb or vale, in glade or woodland, here beside some huge boulder or stone, there on the line of a primæval foss-dyke, or beneath some mighty and sacred tree.1 1 For barrow-trysts, cf. Albretesberga (afterwards Cranbourne), Badbury, Modbury, Langeberga, Chalbury, Hunesberga; for "duns," Canendon (Wimbourne), Faringdon, Glochresdon; for boulders, Stane (Cerne Abbas), Golderonestone, some monolith by Burton Bradstock; for trees, Cuferdstroue, a tree on Culliford Barrow in Whitcomb parish; for foss, Concresdic or Combsditch; for glade, comb, burn, ford, wood, Cocden, Uggescomb, Sherborne, Tollerford, Ayleswood. СНАР. І. England of But even its hundred names show how soon the The winning of the land began. Dorchester tells of the Ecgberht new life growing up on the Roman ruins, Knolton and Gillingham of the new "tons" and "hams which rose about the settlements of the conquerors; while Beaminster, Yetminster, and Christchurch recall the work of the new Christendom that settled at last on the soil. Nowhere indeed was the industrial work of the Church more energetic; we have seen how Ealdhelm planted centres of agriculture as well as of religion at Sherborne and Wareham, and if more than a third of the shire belonged in later days to the clergy, it was in the main because monk and priest had been foremost in the reclamation of the land.1 Much indeed remained to be done. As late as the eve of the Norman conquest, but thirty or forty thousand inhabitants were scattered over the soil; 2 the king's forest-rights stretched over wild and waste throughout half the county, and even in the parts that had been won for culture, scrub and brushwood broke the less fruitful ground, while relics of the vanished woodland lingered in the copses beside every homestead, the " pannage woods" of beech and oak, and the "barren woods" of other timber that gave no mast to the swineherd. But in spite of all, the work of civilization had be- Its industrial life. gun. 1 At the Conquest, the Bishop was the largest proprietor in the whole shire; he held in fact a tenth of it, while twice as much was held by religious houses at Shaftesbury, Cerne, Milton, and Abbotsbury. Eyton, "Dorset Domesday," 156. 2 Eyton, "Dorset Domesday," 152. The Ecgland of formed centres of social and industrial life were rising CHAP. I beside the harbours of the coast or clustering under the shelter of the great abbeys. Even where the bulk Egberht. of the land lay waste, pastures stretched along the lower slopes of the moorland, whose herbage, though too rough and broken for the scythe, gave fair grazing ground to the herds of the township, while by stream and river ran the meadow-lands of homestead after homestead, clear of scrub and thicket, girt in by ditch and fence. About the homestead stretched the broad acres of the corn-land, with gangs of eight oxen, each dragging its plough through the furrows. All the features of English life, in fact, all its characteristic figures were already there. We see mills grinding along the burns, the hammer rings in the village smithy, the thegn's hall rises out of its demesne, the parish priest is at his mass-book in the little church that forms the centre of every township, reeves are gathering their lord's dues, forester and verderer wake the silent woodland with hound and horn, the moot gathers for order and law beneath the sacred oak or by the grey stone on the moor, along the shore the well-to-do salt-men are busy with their saltpans, and the fishers are washing their nets in the little coast hamlets, and setting apart the due of fish for their lords.1 1 No manor was complete without its mill, and Domesday gives 272 mills in Dorset, some simply winter-mills, some on streamlets that have now wholly vanished. Most of the smiths lived in the country towns. Though salt was already dug from the Cheshire mines, the want of communication forced each district to supply itself as it could, and we find in Domesday between CHAP. I. England of Side by side, however, with this industrial change The in the temper and aspect of the country was going Ecğberht. on a far more profound change in its moral life. Influence We have already noted the more striking and picof Christianity. turesque sides of the revolution which had been wrought in the displacement of the old faith and the adoption of the new, the planting of a Church on the soil with its ecclesiastical organization, its bishops, its priests, its court, and its councils, its language, its law, above all the new impulse given to political consolidation by the building up of Britain into a single religious communion. But these results of the new faith were small and unimportant beside the revolution which was wrought by it in individual life. From the cradle to the grave it had forced on the Englishman a new law of conduct, new habits, new conceptions of life and society. It entered above all into that sphere within which the individual will of the freeman had been till now supreme, the sphere of the home; it curtailed his powers over child and wife and slave; it forbade infanticide, the putting away of wives, or cruelty to the serf. It challenged almost every social conception; it denied to the king his heritage of the blood of the gods; it proclaimed slavery an evil, war an evil, manual labour a virtue. It met the feud face to face by denouncing revenge. It held up gluttony and drunkenness, the very seventy and eighty salt-men along the Dorset coast, seemingly |