in the higher empire; but afterwards they extended beyond the Roman territory, and having been conferred by the northern nations upon their leaders, they subsist to this day, and contribute to the dignity of the modern courts of Europe.

But Constantine made a much greater change with regard to religion, by the establishment of Christianity. At what time the gospel was first preached in this island, I believe it impossible to ascertain; as it came in gradually, and without, or rather contrary to public authority. It was most probably first introduced among the legionary soldiers; for we find St. Alban, the first British martyr, to have been of that body. As it was introduced privately, so its growth was for a long time insensible; but it shot up at length with great vigour, and spread itself widely at first under the favour of Constantius, and the protection of Helena, and at length under the establishment of Constantine. From this time it is to be considered as the ruling religion; though heathenism subsisted long after, and at last expired imperceptibly, and with as little noise as Christianity had been at first introduced.

In this state, with regard to the civil, military, and religious establishment, Britain remained without any change, and at intervals in a tolerable state of repose, until the reign of Valentinian. Then it was attacked all at once with incredible fury and success, and as it were in concert, by a number of barbarous nations. The principal of these were the Scots, a people of antient settlement in Ireland, and who had thence been transplanted into the northern part of Britain, which afterwards derived its name from that colony. The Scots of both nations united with the Picts to fall upon the Roman province. To these were added the piratical Saxons, who issued from the mouths of the Rhine. For some years they met but slight resistance, and made a most miserable havoc, until the famous Count Theodosius was sent to the relief of Britain; who by an admirable conduct in war, and as vigorous application to the cure of domestic disorders, for a time freed the country from its enemies and oppressors; and having driven the Picts and Scots into the barren extremity of the island, he shut and barred them in with a new wall, advanced as far as the remotest of the former; and, what had hitherto been imprudently neglected, he erected the intermediate space into a Roman province, and a regular government, under the name of Valentia. But this was only a momentary relief.

The empire was perishing by the vices of its constitution.

Each province was then possessed by the inconsiderate ambition of appointing a head to the whole; although, when the end was obtained, the victorious province always returned to its antient insignificance, and was lost in the common slavery. A great army of Britains followed the fortune of Maximus, whom they had raised to the imperial titles, into Gaul. They were there defeated; and from their defeat, as it is said, arose a new people. They are supposed to have settled in Armorica, which was then, like many other parts of the sickly empire, becon:e a mere desert; and that country from this accident has been since called Bretagne.

The Roman province, thus weakened, afforded opportunity and encouragement to the barbarians again to invade and ravage it. Stilico, indeed, during the minority of Honorius, obtained some advantages over them, which procured a short intermission of their hostilities. But as the empire on the continent was now attacked on all sides, and staggered under the innumerable shocks which it received, that minister ventured to recall the Roman forces from Britain, in order to sustain those parts which he judged of more importance, and in greater danger.

On the intelligence of this desertion, their barbarous enemies break in upon the Britains, and are no longer resisted. Their antient protection withdrawn, the people became stupified with terrour and despair. They petition the emperour for succour in the most moving terms. The emperour, protesting his weakness, commits them to their own defence, absolves them from their allegiance, and confers on them a freedom, which they have no longer the sense to value, nor the virtue to defend. Tho princes, whom after this desertion, they raised and deposed with a stupid inconstancy, were styled emperours. So hard it is to change ideas, to which men have been long accustomed, especially in government, that the Britains had no notion of a sovereign, who was not to be emperour, nor of an emperour, who was not to be master of the western world. This single idea ruined Britain. Constantine, a native of this island, one of those shadows of imperial majesty, no sooner found himself established at home, than, fatally for himself and his country, he turned his eyes towards the continent. Thither he carried the flower of the British youth; all who were any ways eminent for birth, for courage, for their skill in the military or mechanic arts: but his success

was not equal to his hopes or his forces. The remains of his routed army joined their countrymen in Armorica, and a baffled attempt upon the empire a second time recruited Gaul and exhausted Britain.

The Scots and Picts, attentive to every advantage, rushed with redoubled violence into this vacuity. The Britains, who could find no protection but in slavery, again implore the assistance of their former masters. At that time Aetius commanded the imperial forces in Gaul, and with the virtue and military skill of the antient Romans supported the empire tottering with age and weakness. Though he was then pressed hard by the vast armies of Attila, which, like a deluge, had overspread Gaul, he afforded them a small and temporary succour. This detachment of Romans repelled the Scots; they repaired the walls; and animating the Britains by their example and instructions, to maintain their freedom, they departed. But the Scots easily perceived and took advantage of their departure. Whilst they ravaged the country, the Britains renewed their supplications to Aetius. They once more obtained a reinforcement, which again re-established their affairs. They were, however, given to understand, that this was to be their last relief. The Roman auxiliaries were recalled, and the Britains abandoned to their own fortune for ever.

When the Romans deserted this island, they left a country, with regard to the arts of war or government, in a manner barbarous, but destitute of that spirit, or those advantages, with which sometimes a state of barbarism is attended. They carried out of each province its proper and natural strength, and supplied it by that of some other, which had no connection with the country. The troops raised in Britain often served in Egypt; and those which were employed for the protection of this island, were sometimes from Batavia or Germany; sometimes from provinces far to the

east.

Whenever the strangers were withdrawn, as they were very easily, the province was left in the hands of men wholly unpractised in war. After a peaceable possession of more than three hundred years, the Britains derived but very few benefits from their subjection to the conquerours and civilizers of mankind. Neither does it appear, that the Roman people were at any time extremely numerous in this island, or had spread themselves, their manners, or their language, as extensively in Britain, as they had done in the other parts of their empire. The Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon languages retain much

less of Latin than the French, the Spanish, or the Italian. The Romans subdued Britai at a later period; at a time when Italy herself was not sufficiently populous to supply so remote a province; she was rather supplied from her provinces. The military colonies, though in some respects they were admirably fitted for their purposes, had however one essential defect: the lands granted to the soldiers did not pass to their posterity; so that the Roman people must have multiplied poorly in this island, when their increase principally depended on a succession of superannuated soldiers. From this defect the colonies wero continually falling to decay. They had also in many respects degenerated from their primitive institution.* We must add that in the decline of the empire a great part of the troops in Britain were barbarians, Batavians, or Germans. Thus at the close of this period, this unhappy country, desolated of its inhabitants, abandoned by its masters, stripped of its artizans, and deprived of all its spirit, was in a condition the most wretched and forlorn.

BOOK II. CHAPTER I.

THE ENTRY AND SETTLEMENT OF THE SAXONS, AND THEIR CONVERSION TO

CHRISTIANITY.

AFTER having been so long subject to a foreign dominion, there was among the Britains no royal family, no respected order in the state, none of those titles to government confirmed by opinion and long use ore effica

cious than the wisest schemes for the settlement of the nation. Mere personal merit was then the only pretence to power. But this circumstance only added to the misfortunes of a people who had no orderly method of elec tion, and little experience of merit in any of the candidates. During this anarchy, whilst they suffered the most dreadful calamities from

*Neque conjugiis suscipiendis, neque alendis liberis sueti, orbas sine posteris domos relinquebant. Non enim, ut olim universæ legiones, cum tribunis et centurionibus, et suis cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et caritate rempublicam efficerent, sed ignoti inter se, diversis manipulis, sine rectore, sine affectibus mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium, repente in unum collecti, numerus magis quam colonia. Tacit. Annal. xiv. 27.

the fury of barbarous nations, which invaded them, they fell into that disregard of religion, and those loose disorderly manners, which are sometimes the consequence of desperate and hardened wretchedness, as well as the common distempers of ease and prosperity.

At length, after frequent elections and deposings, rather wearied out by their own inconstancy, than fixed by the merit of their choice, they suffered Vortigern to reign over them. This leader had made some figure in the conduct of their wars and factions. But he was no sooner settled on the throne, than he showed himself rather like a prince born of an exhausted stock of royalty in the decline of empire, than one of those bold and active spirits, whose manly talents obtain them the first place in their country, and stamp upon it that character of vigour essential to the prosperity of a new commonwealth. However, the mere settlement, in spite of the ill administration of government, procured the Britains some internal repose, and some temporary advantages over their enemies the Picts. But having been long habituated to defeats, neither relying on their king nor on themselves, and fatigued with the obstinate attacks of an enemy, whom they sometimes checked, but could never remove, in one of their national assemblies it was resolved to call in the mercenary aid of the Saxons, a powerful nation of Germany, which had been long by their piratical incursions terrible not only to them, but to all the adjacent countries. This resolution has been generally condemned. It has been said, that they seem to have, through mere cowardice, distrusted a strength not yet worn down, and a fortune sufficiently prosperous. But as it was taken by general counsel and consent, we must believe that the necessity of such a step was felt, though the event was dubious. The event, indeed, might be dubious; in a state radically weak, every measure vigorous enough for its protection, must endanger its existence. There is an unquestioned tradition among the northern nations of Europe, importing that all that part of the world had suffered a great and general revolution, by a migration from Asiatic Tartary of a people whom they call Asers. These every where expelled or subdued the antient inhabitants of the Celtic and Cimbric original. The leader of this Asiatic army was called Odin or Wodin; first their general, afterwards their tutelar deity. The time of this great change is lost in the imperfection of traditionary history, and the attempts to supply it by fable. It is however certain, that the Saxon nation believed them

selves the descendants of those conqueras ; and they had as good a title to that descent as any other of the northern tribes; for they used the same language, which then was, and is still, spoken, with small variation of the dia lects, in all the countries which extend from the polar circle to the Danube. This people most probably derived their name, as well as their origin, from the Sacæ, a nation of the Asiatic Scythia. At the time of which we write, they had seated themselves in the Cimbric Chersonesus, or Jutland, in the countries of Holstein and Sleswick, and thence extended along the Elbe and Weser to the coast of the German ocean, as far as the mouths of the Rhine. In that tract they lived in a sort of loose military commonwealth of the ordi nary German model under several leaders, the most eminent of whom was Hengist, descended from Odin, the great conductor of the Asiatic colonies. It was to this chief that the Britains applied themselves. They invited him by a promise of ample pay for his troops, a large share of their common plunder, and the isle of Thanet for a settlement.

The army, which came over under Hengist, did not exceed fifteen hundred men. The opinion which the Britains had entertained, of the Saxon prowess was well founded; for they had the principal share in a decisive victory which was obtained over the Picts soon after their arrival ; a victory which for ever freed the Britains from all terrour of the Picts and Scots, but in the same moment exposed them to an enemy no less dangerous.

Hengist and his Saxons, who had obtained by the free vote of the Britains that introduc tion into this island they had so long in vain attempted by arms, saw that by being neces sary they were superiour to their allies. They discovered the character of the king; they were eye-witnesses of the internal weakness and distraction of the kingdom. This state of Britain was represented with so much effect to the Saxons in Germany, that another and much greater embarkation followed the first; new bodies daily crowded in. As soon as the Saxons began to be sensible of their strength, they found it their interest to be discontented; they complained of breaches of a contract, which they construed according to their own design, and then fell rudely upon their unprepared and feeble allies, who, as they had not been able to resist the Picts and Scots, were still less in a condition to oppose that force by which they had been protected against those enemies, when turned unexpect ediy upon themselves. Hengist, with very

little opposition, subdued the province of Kent, and there laid the foundation of the first Saxon kingdom. Every battle the Britains fought only prepared them for a new defeat, by weakening their strength, and displaying the inferiority of their courage. Vortigern, instead of a steady and regular resistance, op posed a mixture of timid war and unable negotiation. In one of their meetings, wherein the business, according to the German mode, was carried on amidst feasting and riot, Vortigern was struck with the beauty of a Saxon virgin, a kinswoman of Hengist, and entirely under his influence. Having married her, he delivered himself over to her councils.

His people, harassed by their enemies, betrayed by their prince, and indignant at the feeble tyranny that oppressed them, deposed him, and set his son Vortimer in his place. But the change of the king proved no remedy for the exhausted state of the nation, and the constitutional infirmity of the government. For even if the Britains could have supported themselves against the superior abilities and efforts of Hengist, it might have added to their honour, but would have contributed little to their safety. The news of his success had roused all Saxony. Five great bodies' of that adventurous people, under different and independent commanders, very nearly at the same tine broke in upon as many different parts of the island. They came no longer as pirates, but as invaders. Whilst the Britains contended with one body of their fierce enemies, another gained ground, and filled with slaughter and desolation the whole country from sea to sea. A devouring war, a dreadful famine, a plague, the most wasteful of any recorded in our history, united to consummate the ruin of Britain. The ecclesiastical writers of that age, confounded at the view of those complicated calamities, saw nothing but the arm of God stretched out for the punishment of a sinful and disobedient nation. And truly, when we set before us in one point of view the condition of almost all the parts which had lately composed the western empire, of Britain, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain, of Africa, at once overwhelmed by a resistless inundation of most cruel barbarians, whose inhuman method of war made but a small part of the miseries with which these nations were afflicted, we are almost driven out of the circle of political inquiry: we are in a manner compelled to acknowledge the hand of God in those immense revolutions, by which, at certain periods, he so signally asserts his supreme dominion, and brings about that great system of chauge

which is perhaps as necessary to the moral as it is found to be in the natural world.

But whatever was the condition of the other parts of Europe, it is generally agreed, that the state of Britain was the worst of all. Some writers have asserted, that, except those who took refuge in the mountains of Wales and in Cornwall, or fled into Armorica, the British race was in a manner destroyed. What is extraordinary, we find England in a very tolerable state of population, in less than two centuries after the first invasion of the Saxons; and it is hard to imagine either the transplantation or the increase of that single people to have been, in so short a time, sufficient for the settlement of so great an extent of country. Others speak of the Britains not as extirpated, but as reduced to a state of slavery; and here these writers fix the origin of personal and predia! servitude in England.

I shall lay fairly before the reader all I have been able to discover concerning the existence or condition of this unhappy people. That they were much more broken and reduced than any other nation, which had fallen under the German power, I think may be inferred from two considerations: First, that in all other parts of Europe the antient language subsisted after the conquest, and at length incorporated with that of the conquerours: whereas, in England, the Saxon language received little or no tincture from the Welsh; and it seems, even among the lowest people, to have continued a dialect of pure Teutonic to the time in which it was itself blended with the Nor man. Secondly, that on the continent the Christian religion, after the northern irruptions, not only remained, but flourished. It was very early and universally adopted by the ruling people. In England it was so entirely extinguished, that, when Augustin undertook his mission, it does not appear that among all the Saxons there was a single person professing Christianity.

The sudden extinction of the antient religion and language appear sufficient to show that Britain must have suffered more than any of the neighbouring nations on the continent. But it must not be concealed that there are likewise proofs, that the British race, though much diminished, was not wholly extirpated; and that those who remained were not, merely as Britains, reduced to servitude. For they are mentioned as existing in some of the earlier Saxon laws. In these laws they are allowed a compensation on the footing of the meaner kind of English; and they are even permitted, as well as the English, to emerge

out of that low rank into a more liberal condition. This is degradation, but not slavery.* The affairs of that whole period are, how ever, covered with an obscurity not to be dissipated. The Britains had little leisure, or ability, to write a just account of a war, by which they were ruined. And the AngloSaxons, who succeeded them, attentive only to arms, were, until their conversion, ignorant of the use of letters.

It is on this darkened theatre that some old writers have introduced those characters and actions, which have afforded such ample matter to poets, and so much perplexity to historians. This is the fabulous and heroic age of our nation. After the natural and just representations of the Roman scene, the stage is again crowded with enchanters, giants, and all the extravagant images of the wildest and most remote antiquity. No personage makes so conspicuous a figure in these stories as King Arthur; a prince whether of British or Roman origin, whether born on this island or in Armorica, is uncertain; but it appears that he opposed the Saxons with remarkable virtue, and no small degree of success, which has rendered him and his exploits so large an argument of romance, that both are almost disclaimed by history. Light scarce begins to dawn until the introduction of Christianity; which, bring ing with it the use of letters, and the arts of civil life, affords at once a juster account of things and facts, that are more worthy of relation: nor is there indeed any revolution so remarkable in the English history.

The bishops of Rome had for some time meditated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. Pope Gregory, who is surnamed the Great, effected that pious design with an uncommon zeal: and he at length found a circumstance highly favourable to it, in the marriage of a daughter of Charibert, a king of the Franks, to the reigning monarch of Kent. This opportunity induced Pope Gregory to commission Augustin, a monk of Rheims, and a man of distinguished piety, to undertake this arduous enterprize.

It was in the year of Christ 600, and 150 years after the coming of the first Saxon colonies into England, that Ethelbert, king of Kent, received intelligence of the arrival in his dominions of a number of men in a foreign garo, practising several strange and unusual ceremonies, who desired to be conducted to the king's presence, declaring that they had

*Leges Ina 32 de cambrico homine agrum possidente. Idem 54.

things to communicate to him and to his people of the utmost importance to their eternal wel. fare. This was Augustin, with forty of the associates of his mission, who now landed in the isle of Thanet, the same place, by which the Saxons had before entered when they extirpated Christianity.

The king heard them in the open air, in order to defeat,* upon a principle of druidical superstition, the effects of their enchantments. Augustin spoke by a Frankish interpreter. The Franks and Saxons were of the same origin, and used at that time the same language. He was favourably received; and a place in the city of Canterbury, the capital of Kent, was allotted for the residence of him and his companions. They entered Canterbury in procession, preceded by two persons, who bore a silver cross and the figure of Christ painted on a board; singing as they went litanies to avert the wrath of God from that city and people.

The king was among their first converts. The principal of his nobility, as usual, followed that example; moved, as it is related, by many signal miracles, but undoubtedly by the extraordinary zeal of the missionaries, and the pious austerity of their lives. The new religion, by the protection of so respected a prince, who held under his dominion or influence all the countries to the southward of the Humber, spread itself with great rapidity. Paganism, after a faint resistance, every where gave way. And indeed the chief difficulties, which Christianity had to encounter, did not arise so much from the struggles of opposite religious prejudices, as from the gross and licentious manners of a barbarous people. One of the Saxon princes expelled the Christians from his territory, because the priest refused to give him some of that white bread which he saw distributed to his congregation.

It is probable that the order of Druids either did not at all subsist among the Anglo-Saxons, or that at this time it had declined not a little from its antient authority and reputation; else it is not easy to conceive how they admitted so readily a new system, which at one stroke cut off from their character its whole importance. We even find some chiefs of the Pagan priesthood among the foremost in submitting to the new doctrine. On the first preaching of the gospel in Northumberland, the heathen pontiff of that territory immediately mounted an horse which to those of his order was unlawful, and

*Veteri usus augurio, says Henry of Huntingdon, p. 321.