and that these, when ripened, gathered and ground to powder, made a delicious food, which we call bread. When that was found out real civilization began; for a third trade was added,
that of agriculture, the most paying of all.
So one by one the earth gave up her secrets to our forefathers, and, like Adam and Eve,
they went forth to subdue and replenish this
Isle of Britain. Each century that passed,
they lived longer, were better fed, better housed, used better weapons, killed off more wild beasts. They quarrelled, of course, and even killed each other; family often fought with family, tribe with tribe, for they were always breaking the Tenth Commandment.
But such quarrels were not perpetual; tribe might often join with tribe, and so begin to form one nation or people. How they were governed, what their laws and customs were,
what their religious ideas were, we can only guess. Perhaps the eldest man of the tribe was a sort of king and declared what were the
“customs” which the tribe must keep; said
“this would make the gods angry” and that would not; settled the disputes about a sheep or piece of corn-land; led the tribe to fight in battle. Perhaps this king pretended to be descended from the gods, and his tribe got to believe it.
Who were the gods? Sun, moon, stars,
rivers, trees, lakes; the rain, the lightning, the clouds; perhaps certain animals; dead ancestors, if they had been brave men, would come to be counted gods. But all round you weregods and spirits of some sort whom you must appease by sacrifices, or by absurd customs.
“Do not cut your hair by moonlight, or the goddess of the moon will be angry.” “If you are the king, never cut your hair at all.”
“Luck” perhaps was the origin of many of such customs; some famous man had once cut his hair by moonlight, and next day he had been struck by lightning. Then there were priests, or “medicine-men” of some kind.
These would generally support the king; but they would often bully him also, and try to make him enforce absurd customs.
And so the ages rolled along, and these
“Cave men” or “Stone Age men” began to thin the forests a little or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest fires. They began to come down from the hill-tops, on which their earliest homes had been made,
into the valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and began to build themselves villages of little wooden huts; they began to make regular beaten track-ways along the slopes of the downs; they began, perhaps, to raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods.
Was it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins even now strike us with wonder and terror?
Tribe began to exchange its goods with tribe; the flints of Sussex for the deer horns of
Devon, for deer horns make excellent pickaxes.
Foreign traders came too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps to buy slaves.
Our ancestors were quite willing to sell their fellow men, captives taken in war from other tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not very clear; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as we now sell to savages; perhaps casks of strong drink; perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons of bronze; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that there were richer and more civilized men than themselves living beyond the seas, who had things which they lacked; and, as they coveted such things, they had to make or catch something to buy them with. Therefore they bred more big dogs,
killed and skinned more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in Britain, and its benefits came first to those dwellers of the southern and south-eastern coasts who were nearest to the ports of Europe.
But the foreign traders also took home with them the report that Britain looked a fertile country, and was quite worth conquering.
And so, perhaps about a thousand years before
Christ, a set of new tribes began to cross the
Channel, and to land in our islands, not as traders, but as fighters. Terrible big fellows they were, with fair hair, and much stronger than the Stone Age men. They were armed,
too, with this new-fangled bronze, which made short work of our poor little bows and flinttipped arrows and spears. Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once fled to the forests, fled ever northward or westward,
or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterward married their conquerors.
The Celts, for that was the name of the new people, seized all the best land, all the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the hilltops, and began to lead in Britain the life which they had been leading for several centuries in the country we now call France. From these Celts the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh people are mainly descended.
They rode on war-ponies, and, like the
Assyrians in the Bible, they drove war-chariots;
they knew, or were soon taught by foreign traders, how to dig in the earth for minerals,
and they soon did a large trade in that valuable metal, tin, which is found in Cornwall, They were in every way more civilized than the Stone
Age men; their gods were fiercer and stronger;
their priests, called Druids, more powerful;
their tribes were much larger and better organized for war. Their methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep and cow breeding, were much better; their trade with their brothers in France was far greater. Before they, in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the use of iron for tools and weapons; flint had gone down before bronze;
so now bronze, which is a soft metal and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the cheap and hard gray iron. He who has the best tools will win in the fight with Nature; he who has the best weapons will beat his fellow men in battle.
Meanwhile, far away in the East, great empires had been growing up and decaying for six or seven thousand years. Each contributed something to civilization, Egypt,
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece; each in turn made a bid for conquering and civilizing the “known world.” But the world that they knew stretched little beyond the warm and tideless Mediterranean Sea. After all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress and conqueror of all these civilizations and empires. Rome brought to her task a genius for war and government which none of them had known. The Roman armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France, and from
France they passed to Britain. The greatest of Roman soldiers, Caius Julius Caesar, who was conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in Kent, about fifty years before
Christ’s birth. He found it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which he crossed a little above London; tough almost as much because of the forests as because of the valiant
Britons, although in the open field these were no match for the disciplined Roman regiments called “legions.” It is this Caesar who wrote the first account of our island and our people which has come down to us. He was very much astonished at the tide which he found in the Channel; and his book leaves us with the impression that the spirit of the dear motherland had breathed valour and cunning in defence into the whole British people.
For ninety years after his raid no Roman armies came to the island. But Roman traders came and Romanized Celts from France, who laughed at the “savage” ways of the British
Celts. Men began to talk, in the wooden or wattle huts of British Kings (hitherto believed by the Britons to be the most magnificent buildings imaginable), of the name and fame of the great empire, of streets paved with marble, and of houses roofed with gilded bronze; of the invincible Roman legions clad
in steel and moving like steel machines; of the great paved roads driven like arrows over hill and dale, through the length and breadth of Western Europe, of the temples and baths,
of the luxurious waterways of the South.
Rome attr
acted and terrified many peoples,
even before she conquered them. The Roman
Emperor seemed to men who had never seen him to be a very god upon earth.
But the Roman conquest began in earnest in the year 43, and within half a century was fairly complete. At first it was cruel; Roman soldiers were quite pitiless; for those who resisted they had only the sword or slavery.
The north and west of Britain resisted long and hard and often. Once under the great Queen
Boadicea, whose statue now stands on Westminister Bridge in London, the Britons cut to pieces a whole Roman legion. Then came cruel vengeance and reconquest; but, after reconquest, came such peace and good government as Britain had never seen before. The
Romans introduced into all their provinces a system of law so fair and so strong that almost all the best laws of modern Europe have been founded on it. Everywhere the weak were protected against the strong; castles were built on the coast, with powerful garrisons in them; fleets patrolled the Channel and the
North Sea. Great roads crossed the island from east to west and from north to south.
Great cities, full of all the luxuries of the South,
grew up. Temples were built to the Roman gods; and country-houses of rich Roman gentlemen, of which you may still see the remains here and there. These gentlemen at first talked about exile, shivered and cursed the
“beastly British climate,” heated their houses with hot air, and longed to get home to Italy.
But many stayed; their duty or their business obliged them to stay: and into them too the spirit of the dear motherland entered and became a passion. Their children, perhaps,
never saw Rome; but Rome and Britain had an equal share of their love and devotion, and they, perhaps, thought something like this:
The Roman Centurion Speaks
Legate, I had the news last night. My cohort’s
ordered home,
By ship to Portus Itius and thence by road to
Rome.
I’ve marched the companies aboard, the arms
are stowed below:
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!
I’ve served in Britain forty years, from Vectis
to the Wall
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the
hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.
Here where men say my name was made,
here where my work was done,
Here where my dearest dead are laid — my
wife — my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age,
memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how shall I remove?
For me this land, that sea, these airs, those
folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our
changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled
with August haze,
The clanging arch of steel-gray March, or June’s long-lighted days?
You’ll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps
Nemausus clean
To Arelate’s triple gate; but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!
You’ll take the old Aurelian Road through
shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock’s neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
You’ll go where laurel crowns are won, but
will you e’er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?
Let me work here for Britain’s sake — at any
task you will —
A marsh to drain, a road to make, or native
troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or
granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old mess-mates sleep.
Legate, I come to you in tears — my cohort
ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — - the
only life I know —
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!
And peace was imposed all over Southern
Britain; and the legions came to be stationed only on the frontier, and hardly ever moved.
No doubt at first these legions were recruited from all the regions over which Rome ruled,
and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from
Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been recruited in Britain itself and from
Britons. Celtic mothers bore British sons to
Roman fathers, and crooned Celtic songs over the cradles of babies who would one day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue,
which the Romans had brought with them,
was enriched with many Celtic words.
It was, however, a misfortune for Britain that Rome never conquered the whole island.
The great warrior Agricola did, between a.d.
79 and 85, penetrate far into Scotland; but he could leave no traces of civilization behind him,
and Ireland he never touched at all. So
Ireland never went to school, and has been a spoilt child ever since. And there was always a “Scottish frontier” to be guarded, and along this frontier the Emperor Hadrian, early inthe second century, began the famous Roman
Wall. His successors improved on it until it became a mighty rampart of stone, eighty miles long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers.
To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched, certainly unsubdued, the wilder
Celts whom the Romans called “Picts” or painted men; the screen of the wall seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these.
But prosperity and riches are often bad for men; they lead to the neglect of defence. I
fear that Roman Britain went to sleep behind her walls, recruiting fell off, the strength of the legions became largely a “paper strength.”
And not only in Britain. The greatest empire that the world has ever seen was slowly dying at the heart, dying of too much power,
too much prosperity, too much luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day! There were pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, landthieves and sea-thieves. They began to break through the frontiers. One fine day the terrible news came to York, the capital of Roman
Britain, that the Picts were over the wall.
Where was the commander-in-chief? Oh! he was at Bath taking the waters to cure his indigestion. Where was the prefect (the highest
representative of the Emperor)? Oh! he lived at Lyons in Southern France; for he governed
France as well as Britain. Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down to Italy to make himself Emperor! If so, he would be for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain instead of sending more to defend it. “A few barbarians more or less over the wall” mattered very little to a man who lived, by neglecting his duties, in Southern
France; “they could easily be driven back next year.”
But it soon came to be less easy, and the barbarians soon came to be more than a few.
An officer, called the “Count of the Saxon
Shore,” was created to watch against the pirates.
The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for themselves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome, Britain, and civilization were equally coming to an end, and it would be long before they revived. Half a century had completed the Roman conquest of the island; two and a half centuries of happy peace had
followed; in another half century it was all over. Long before the last Roman legions were withdrawn, in 407, pirates had been breaking down all the walls and defences of Britain.
Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic Scots from
Ireland; worse than all, down the North-east wind came terrible “Englishmen,” “Saxons,”
from the shores of North Germany and Denmark. Rome had forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves with rabbits and lambs;
now they were going to feast once more upon the corpses of men.
CHAPTER II
SAXON ENGLAND
The Pirates in England
When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall,
And the sceptre passed from her hand,
The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall
To harry the British land.
The little dark men of the mountain and waste,
So quick to laughter and tears,
They came panting with hate and haste
For the loot of five hundred years.
They killed the trader, they sacked the shops,
They ruined temple and town —
They swept like wolves through the standing crops
Crying that Rome was down.
They wiped out all that they could find
Of beauty and strength and worth,
But they could not wipe out the Viking’s Wind,
That brings the ships from the North.
They could not wipe out the North-east gales5
Nor what those gales set free —
The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails,
Leaping from sea to sea.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 826