Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  They had forgotten the shield-hung hull

  Seen nearer and more plain,

  Dipping into the troughs like a gull,

  And gull-like rising again —

  The painted eyes that glare and frown,

  In the high snake-headed stem,

  Searching the beach while her sail comes down,

  They had forgotten them!

  There was no Count of the Saxon Shore

  To meet her hand to hand,

  As she took the beach with a surge and a roar,

  And the pirates rushed inland.

  Early in the fourth century the Roman

  Empire had become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire.

  One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was

  afterward dedicated. It is probable, however,

  that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire,

  Britain was divided in bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down.

  Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent — you might almost say conscientious

  — heathens. They feared and hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civilization; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, were also being overrun by barbarians, but none of these was as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore in Italy, France,

  and Spain the “re-making” of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in

  Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westward to the Severn.

  An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked.

  “Some therefore of the miserable remnant

  (of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great numbers, others constrained by famine came and yielded themselves to be slaves forever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offeredthem: some others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations.”

  The Saxons brought their wives and children with them, though it is difficult to believe that they were so stupid as to kill all the Britons instead of enslaving them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not done this, surely there would have been some traces left of Latin or Celtic speech, law, and religion. But there were none. When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely

  English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely

  English language; while, as for religion, the people have to be converted all over again by a special mission from the Pope at Rome.

  Probably the British made a very desperate defence, and were only slowly beaten westward into Wales, Lancashire, Devon, and

  Cornwall. Something like two centuries passed before the English were thorough masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that while Roman temples, churches, roads, and cities were crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins. Studying the history of those days is like looking at a battlefield in a fog. As the fog clears we get some notion of our dear barbarian forefathers.

  The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with the vices and cruelties of an overgrown boy;

  a drunkard and a gambler, and very stupid.

  But he was a truth-teller, a brave, patient,

  and cool-headed fellow. A Roman historian describes him as “a free-necked man married to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses kick.” He honoured his women and he loved his home; and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more than into any of those who lived before or came after him. He never knew when he was beaten,

  and so he took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to Britain, so completely that within two centuries his coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe; and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were always coming.

  England should always beware of the northeast wind. It blows her no good.

  Tilling the fields was the Saxon’s real job;

  he was a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature,

  and like a true plough- and cow-boy he was always grumbling. He hated being governed;

  he always stood up for his “rights,” and oftentalked a lot of nonsense about them. He obeyed his kings when he pleased, which was not often, and these kings had very little power over him. But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it with his clumsy plough.

  In the sweat of his brow he ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much of the beer)

  which he raised on it.

  a saxon Every English village could keep itself to village, ‘j-ggj^ since it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except salt, iron, and millstones,

  which could only be found in certain favoured places. In most villages there was a sort of squire called a “thegn,” who paid something,

  either a rent or a service of some kind, to a king or to a bigger thegn, and owned much more land than the ordinary freemen. Probably also he owned a few slaves, whether of

  English or British birth. There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century there was also in most villages a priest. Of the freemen, every head of a family owned certain strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen. There was also a great common

  on which all freemen could pasture their cattle, and a wood wherein the pigs fed. There were few horses, there was no hay to feed them on, cows were only killed for food when they were too old to draw the plough, sheep were chiefly kept for wool, and so the pig was the real friend of hungry men.

  There was in each district some sort of rude government by some sort of rude king, whose ancestor may have been a leading pirate of the first ship-load of Saxons who landed near that place. No doubt many tiny “ kingdoms” sprang up, as ship-load after ship-load of pirates explored and settled inland. Probably the first “kingdoms” extended as far as an armed man could walk before a day’s honest fighting, but these would naturally melt into or be conquered into larger territories. In the seventh century there were at least seven little kingdoms, but, by the eighth, only three of any importance remained:

  Northumbria, stretching from the Forth to the Humber, and westward to the hills that part Cumberland and Lancashire from

  Yorkshire and Northumberland.

  Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the Humber to the Thames and westward to the Severn.

  Wessex, comprising all south of the

  Thames and as far west as Devon.

  When they were tired of fighting the Britons,

  the kings of these small kingdoms constantly fought each other.

  There were laws, or, rather, deeply rooted

  ‘‘customs,” mostly connected with fighting,

  or cows or ploughing. There were rude courts of justice, which would fine a man so many sheep or so many silver pennies for murder or wounding or cow-stealing. The king had a council of “wise men,” who met in his wooden house to advise him, and to drink with him afterward at his rude feasts. There were gods, called Tiu and Woden and Thor and

  Freya, from whom our Tuesday, Wednesday,

  Thursday and Friday are derived. They lived in a heaven called Valhalla, where, our ancestors thought, there was an
endless feast of pork and strong ale, with no headaches to follow.

  All this, as you see, was a barbarous business, after the well-organized, civilized Roman life; but at least it was a life with a good deal of freedom in it. Rome had stifled freedom too much; the Saxons went to the other extreme. It is quite possible to have too much freedom, and you will see what a price these Saxons, before the end of their six hundred years of freedom, had to pay for theirs.

  After the sack of the City when Rome was

  sunk to a name,

  In the years when the lights were darkened,

  or ever St. Wilfred came,

  Low on the borders of Britain (the ancient poets sing)

  Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a

  Saxon King.

  Stubborn were all his people from cotter

  to overlord,

  Not to be cowed by the cudgel, scarce to be

  schooled by the sword,

  Quick to turn at their pleasure, cruel to cross

  in their mood,

  And set on paths of their choosing as the hogs of Andred’s Wood.

  Laws they made in the Witan, the laws of

  flaying and fine —

  Common, loppage and pannage, the theft

  and the track of kine,

  Statues of tun and of market for the fish and

  the malt and the meal,

  The tax on the Bramber packhorse, and the

  tax on the Hastings keel.

  Over the graves of the Druids and under the

  wreck of Rome,

  Rudely but surely they bedded, the plinth of the days to come.

  Behind the feet of the Legions and before

  the Normans’ ire,

  Rudely but greatly begat they the bones of

  state and of shire;

  Rudely but deeply they laboured, and their

  labour stands till now,

  If we trace on our ancient headlands, the twist of their eight-ox plough.

  There was no king really powerful enough to rule the whole island. In a land of forest and swamp, where roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to pass from place to place, except on horseback; and the

  Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we shall see that it was the knight and his horse,

  who, from the eleventh century onward, first made the rule of one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile, the “great men”

  of the Saxons, “thegns,” “aldermen,” “earls,”

  or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their own hands; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents and services from the poorer landowners; they made what is called a “feudal” state of society. In the year 600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120

  acres of land; in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and for this he probably had to pay a heavy rent and to labour on some great man’s land.

  The first rudiments of civilization were brought back to this barbarous England by the Christian missionaries whom Pope Gregory sent thither in the year 597. St. Augustine came and preached in Kent and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canterbury missionaries spread all over the island,

  and, in a century, the heathenism that had rooted out Christianity two hundred years before was quite gone. It seems that the fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. The old Roman capital of York recovered its importance and became an archbishopric.

  Some seventeen other bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monasteries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who retires from the world in order to devote himself to prayer with a view to saving his own soul.

  Besides preaching the true Gospel of our (

  Lord, these missionaries preached the worship J

  of saints, and every church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land

  to a monastery was called “a gift to God and

  His saints.” If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery, the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to give your land to the saints. But this meant that you neglected your worldly duties, such as defending your country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place that the best thing they could do was to get out of it as quickly as possible. The Popes of Rome, who had about this time made themselves supreme heads of all Western Christendom, encouraged this view; and the monks were always devoted servants of the Popes.

  But there were other priests who were not monks, and these usually served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly grew up in England; they were always rather jealous of the monks.

  Human love and common sense were too strong to be taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this more intelligently than most people;

  and so the monasteries became very rich.

  I think it is to the monks that we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers;

  and also our love of fishing. The Church said you were to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on other “fast-days,” and so every monastery, however far from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old monks, in their thick, black woollen frocks, with their sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I hope they were always strictly truthful as to the size of the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks also kept alive what remains of learning there were: they brought books from beyond the seas; they taught schools; made musical instruments, were builders, painters, and craftsmen of all kinds; and produced famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English missionaries went from English abbeys to preach the Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did the Church become that in the councils of our tenth-century kings the bishops and abbots were even more important than the thegns and earls.

  The Church then taught men much and tamed them a little. It certainly helped toward uniting the jarring kingdoms; for

  Christian Northumbria, in the seventh century,

  was the first to exercise a real sort of leadership over the other kingdoms; it was a Northumbrian king, Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh; it was in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow that the good monk Bede wrote the first history of England.

  You may still see Bede’s tomb in Durham Cathedral, with the Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important Northumbrian king fell fighting against the Picts beyond the Forth.

  Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the eighth century, under King Offa, who drove back the Welsh and took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps it was he who built a great rampart there called Offa’s Dyke;

  beyond it, even to this day, all is “Wales.”

  Then his family in turn was beaten by Egbert,

  King of Wessex (802-39). Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name at least, supreme over all England.

  If ever there was a capital city of England before Norman times it was Winchester, the chief town of Wessex; though London, one of the few Roman cities that have never been destroyed or left desolate, must always have been a more important place of trade. From

  Egbert King George V is directly descended!

  Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new and terrible foe. Down to the

  north-east wind, from Denmark, Norway, and the Baltic, all through the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce and cunning pirates began to pour upon

  Western Europe. We call them “the
Danes,”

  or North-men. The British Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another they harried them from end to end. The churches,

  in which the principal wealth of the country was stored, were sacked; the monks were killed,

  and then the pirates went back to their ships.

  From Britain they went on to France and even into the Mediterranean: some of them, indeed,

  crossed the Northern Ocean to Iceland, to

  Greenland, to North America. Their ships,

  some 80 feet long, and 16 feet broad, with a draught of 4 feet, might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth in shirts of mail,

  and bearing heavy axes with shafts as long as a man. Often they came under pretence of trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if they thought the country too strong to be attacked. About the middle of the ninth century they began to settle and make homes in the very lands they had been plundering. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East

  Riding of Yorkshire were regularly colonized by them. So were the Orkney and Shetland

  Isles, the Hebrides, Caithness, and Sutherland,as well as the Isle of Man and the eastern coast of Ireland.

  Their numbers were, however, small, and if

  Saxon England under weak kings had not enjoyed too much “freedom,” they might have been beaten off; but it seemed impossible for the Saxons to collect an army in less than a month, or to keep it in the field when collected.

  Long before the English “host” was ready to fight, the pirates had harried the land and disappeared. At last Alfred the Great (871-901),

  grandson of Egbert, began to turn the tide against the invaders. He defended Wessex all along the line of the Upper Thames, in battle after desperate battle, and at last beat a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire.