Out of this deadly war grew the Teutonic Conquest of our land. The details of the Conquest are largely mythical; and all that we can do here is to tell the story as it is given by the opposite sides, Celt and Saxon, premising that neither version. can be accepted as historical truth.

449

A British chief, Vortigern, who seems to have been hemmed in between a Roman faction and a fast-advancing host of Picts and Scots, called in Saxon pirates to his aid.* Hengist and Horsa (the Stallion and the Mare),† who were sailing with their men in three "Keels" off the coast of Kent, came at once to the rescue. The banner of the White Horse was victorious; and Vortigern gladly granted his allies, what no doubt seemed to him a whimsical request, leave to buy as much land as an ox's hide would cover. Cutting the leather into strips, they managed to enclose what sufficed to build a castle, and there they took their stand, resolved that their little ring of land in Thanet should soon expand its borders into a kingdom. Vortigern, visiting the castle of these seakings, saw there a beautiful golden-haired girl, Rowena, sister of the chiefs. On bended knee she offered him a cup of wine, and so won upon his fancy, or his heart, that he begged her in marriage, and made a present of Kent to her fierce brothers, in order to win their consent to the match. The Britons, who

could not tamely see their fairest province bartered away for a sweet face, rose in rebellion, slew Horsa, and expelled the Saxon settlers. But the pirates came back; and Hengist, hav

* It must not be forgotten that during the Roman occupation a good number of Saxon settlements had been planted on the eastern and southern shores. There may also have been some admixture of German blood in the Roman towns, for the Roman army had been largely recruited from Germany.

In the Berkshire parish of Uffington, twelve miles south-west of Abingdon, the huge figure of a white horse in the act of galloping is cut out on the turf on the face of a chalk hill. It is about 374 feet in length. The "scouring of the white horse" is a rural festival occurring every three years, when the people of the district assemble to clear away the grass which has grown in upon the outline of the figure. It is supposed to represent the sacred horse of the Celts, or to have been cut out by the Saxons. All readers of Mr. Hughes (author of Tom Brown's School Days) are familiar with this Berkshire festival.

ing invited three hundred British chiefs to a feast, made them drunk with mead, and killed all but Vortigern, who had then no resource but to yield Essex and Sussex to his treacherous host. Such is the Welsh version of the landing of the Saxons, founded chiefly on the histories of Gildas and Nennius.

The Saxon story, as given by Bede and the Chronicle, says that the Ethelings, Hengist and Horsa, having been invited by Vortigern to aid him against the Picts and Scots, arrived with three ships. The Picts were routed; but the growing ranks of sea-kings, recruited by new arrivals from the Continent, frightened the Britons, who refused to give them food. Changing their side at once, the invading crews, aided by their late foes the Picts, turned axes and steel-spiked hammers upon the Britons, swept the weak lines before them, and established themselves on the southern and eastern coasts. The invaders came from three tribes in Germany-from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, and from the Jutes.

Then came the conquest of Sussex by Ella, who reduced the capital by hunger, and levelled its walls-the landing of Cerdic in the Isle of Wight and Hampshire-the reduction of Essex by a prince of the Uffingas-the establishment of Bernicia between Tees and Tweed, of Deira between Tees and Humber, and of East Anglia, including Norfolk and Suffolk. The kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, united under one sceptre, became Northumbria. Lastly, as was natural, the inland kingdom of Mercia, or the Marchland, stretching from the Humber to the Severn, was established by some of the latest arrivals.

These invaders are commonly called Saxons, although three tribes-Jutes, Angles, and Saxons-took share in the great migration. They came from the peninsula of Denmark and the shore of the North Sea between the Elbe and the Rhine, and they occupied nearly a century and a half in the foundation of their kingdoms. It would be useless to give the dates of the various settlements, for there is no authentic chronology to fall

back upon.

The arrival of the first three Keels is assigned to the year 449 A.D. The Angles, who occupied the east and the north, were the most numerous and the most cultured, and hence it was from them that the country and the united people took their names-England and the English.

Above the dust of the ceaseless wars which obscures this era of history, there rises, like a clear star, the name of the halfmythical British hero, Arthur. To form an estimate of his character and position approaching to historical likelihood, we must shut our eyes to that halo of splendour with which poetry has invested his name. Son of a Romanized Briton who had won for himself a little kingdom in Hampshire and Wiltshire,

VIA

and who had died at Amesbury* in battle with the troops of the invading Cerdic, Arthur made a brave stand for British liberty in his capital of Camelot or Cadbury. His sword smote the Saxons so heavily at Bath that they ceased for a generation to attack the Britons of the west. It is not likely that Arthur was an ordinary type of manhood. In days when brutality was the rule of war, a character that combined noble daring and unselfish love of fatherland with a gentle heart and a pure life, would shine out clear and bright by very force of contrast with the darker natures around him.

* Arthur's father (poetically called Uther) was perhaps the Ambrosius who opposed Vortigern in the south. Amesbury (Ambres-byrig), which seems to preserve the Roman name, is a town on the Avon in Wiltshire, eight miles north of Salisbury. Stonehenge is in the parish of Amesbury. There are three Cadburys in Somersetshire.

CHAPTER II.

THE MISSION OF AUGUSTINE.

British apostles-Cross and crucifix-Ethelbert-Gregory the Great-The mission-Procession of the monks-Conversion of the Jutes - Feasts retained-Augustine made archbishop-Priests of the Cymri-Ethelbert's "Dooms."

IT

T was not long until the great spiritual power which grew on the ruins of pagan Rome stretched out its hand toward the British Isles. Pope Celestine sent Palladius in 430 A.D., and St. Patrick two years later, to convert the Scots in Ireland. But Ninian and Kentigern, who laboured during the fifth and sixth centuries in the south-west of Scotland, and Columba of Donegal, who landed with twelve monks on the Scottish coast in 563 A.D., bent upon the conversion of the Picts, can hardly be regarded as papal missionaries. Having settled in Iona, a bare little island off the lower horn of Mull, Columba, the apostle of Scotland, established there a school of teachers and preachers that did more true missionary work in Scotland and Northumbria during those dark times than any other class of men.

Columba was a missionary in the truest sense. Augustine was a shrewd, clever, worldly priest, who came as an ambassador from Rome, at the bidding of Pope Gregory the Great, to plant the papal power on the shores of Britain. It is a mistake to call the landing of Augustine the introduction of Christianity into England. It was only the introduction of the authority of