A Short History of England | Page 6

influence of the Catholic Church. The later
pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly
resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at last
too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more distant
than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is, he could
be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it could
not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the old and rather
fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a difference. It is the
difference between a man being a chair and a man being a house.
Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his throne-room he
must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his slave to run, but
he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow changes of the
time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His status began to
have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.
What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of
letters, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration
of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this
decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of

wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as
things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic
locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in
those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are
speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of barbarians
is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of the
borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began
by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay
Britain.
It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman
civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces; but
it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great cities like
York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than the counties,
and indeed older even than the countries. These were connected by a
skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of Britain. But
with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under barbarian
pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who lay beyond
Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The whole of
this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally
mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to go away.
It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from
ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now the duchy
of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they
naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the
trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller
pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green
when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern
Englishmen than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig
people are supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their
appearance is the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather
more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.

III
THE AGE OF LEGENDS

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern
novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a
fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford,
after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a
broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's
young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further
and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary
transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman
period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of
encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional
frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and
then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard
lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The
soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins;
the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and
scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh
chieftain towers up in the twilight as