follow them, into the great forest of Anderida. Many, no doubt-but this is a disputed point -remained on the soil, were allotted land on conditions, and became the "villains" of aftertime, attached to the ground and unable to leave it. The more generous spirits fought their way manfully, always facing the enemy, and succeeded in establishing themselves in three separate kingdoms, viz. of Strathclyde in Cumberland and Westmoreland, of Wales, and of Cornwall. There was never any peace between the fiery Britons and the Saxon conquerors. Time after time they carried war across the frontier; time after time they were repulsed, and invaded in their turn. The king

doms of Cornwall and Strathclyde have long since been absorbed in England. In the former it is said that the traditional hatred of the Saxon still lingers. In Wales itself the people are still Britons in speech, in appearance, in character, and in hereditary, undying hatred of the English.

There are historians who please themselves with finding the remains of Roman institutions surviving the conquest of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Especially do they look for these survivals in London. Their view appears to me perfectly erroneous, and the so-called remains of Roman law and custom in my mind are fanciful and baseless. The invaders made a clean sweep of everything British. The masterful Anglo-Saxon triumphed in everything then as he does now. The Britons that remained on his newly acquired land became slaves or servants; their laws, their rights, their privileges, were all

torn from them, and in the next generation were forgotten, and replaced by the laws and customs of the conquerors. Let me refer in illustration to the history of London during the fifth and sixth centuries.

London was essentially a trading town. Under the Romans it advanced to a position equal to that of Bordeaux or Marseilles; but it was always a trading town. It had its Forum, its imperial offices, its administrative bureaux, its imperial officers, its garrison, its fort; but it was a trading town. It had its lawyers, poets, rhetoricians, musicians, and artists of all kinds; but it was a trading town. It lived by its trade; it had little or no cultivated land outside it; all the supplies were brought in by river and by road. The seas were protected from pirates by the Roman fleets; the merchants brought their wares across the channel from Calais or Boulogne to the Kentish coast, and so through the strait, long since filled up, between Thanet and the mainland; the exports were brought to the port of London by the Roman roads, by which also the imports were carried into the country for distribution. The provisions of the city came down the river along the fertile valley of the Thames in barges, or up the river from Essex, the garden of Britain, and from Kent. London without these supplies could not exist. She purchased their supplies by her trade. If, therefore, the trade was stopped she must starve; if the roads were blocked she must starve; if the river was in the hands of the enemy she must starve.

All these things happened. First the Roman fleets were withdrawn, and the pirates got possession of the German Ocean and the mouth of the Thames. Therefore the foreign merchants were stopped. There was at first danger of meeting pirates and of fighting them; then the danger became a certainty, and a fight meant capture or death; therefore the ships came no more. As the country was overrun by the enemy, one road after another was blocked, and traffic suspended. Thus the export trade was stopped, and at the same time the supply of provisions to the City was also stopped. Food and the means of procuring food being cut off, what could London do? Nothing. There was no siege; there was no massacre of the people; the Roman fort had been pulled down, and its materials, with all the stone that could be found in the City, were used up in the construction of the wall. But there were no defenders, and there was no attack; the people rapidly melted away and disappeared; those of the better sort, one understands, carried their families across to France, where they found shelter and a refuge, though with the loss of all their property; the young men went out to join the British armies of defence; the women and children followed, travelling by night and through the woods to escape the enemy. There was nothing left in the city of London except the deserted villas, the churches, the Forum, the bridge, and the wall. In the port and below the bridge there were no ships, on the quay there were no goods, in the market-place

there was no trade, in the streets there were no people. The deserted city all day long presented the appearance of a city at sunrise, when the folk are all asleep in their peaceful beds. Only by the riverside there lingered the slaves and their descendants, who fished in the river and hunted in the forest. The trees grew up in the gardens, the ivy crept between the stones and dragged them out, the rain fell upon the tessellated pavements and through the roofs; for a hundred years London lay desolate. When the Saxons took possession at last, where were the institutions and the customs of the Roman occupation? They were clean gone-gone and forgotten. And as with London, so with other towns; they were ruined and deserted; all over the country these ruins stood dotted about-they were called Waste Chesters. Here and there a town survived. Chester, Colchester, York, Bath, and a few more preserve portions of their Roman walls; sometimes the walls remain while the town has disappeared, as at Wroxeter, Silchester, Verulam, Porchester, and Pevensey.

The Saxon conquest, so far as it went-it left, as we have seen, a large part of the country unconquered was thorough; the Roman civilization was utterly destroyed.

Let me quote on this point the valuable testimony of J. R. Green ("History of the English People,” i. p. 24):—

“ "What strikes us at once in the new England is, that it was the one purely German nation that rose

upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain, or Gaul, or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman. In Britain alone Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. The villas, the mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a Roman world which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners, its faith went with it. The new England was a heathen country. The religion of Wodin and Thunder triumphed over the religion of Christ. Alone among the German assailants of Rome the English rejected_the faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow. Elsewhere the Christian priesthood served as mediators between the barbarian and the conquered, but in the conquered part of Britain Christianity wholly disappeared. River and homestead and boundary, the very days of the week, bore the names of the new gods who displaced Christ. But if England seemed for the moment a waste from which all the civilization of the world had fled away, it contained within itself the germs of a nobler life than that which had been destroyed. The base of the new English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or sacrificing for himself in his far-off fatherland by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt, while the struggle went on, with the material civilization of Britain, it was impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War was no sooner over than the warrior settled down into a farmer, and the home of the peasant churl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he had burnt. Little knots of kinsfolk drew together in 'tun' and 'ham' beside the Thames and the Trent, as they