Wherever the Anglo-Saxons came, their first work was
to stamp out with fire and sword every trace of the
Roman civilisation. Modern investigations amongst
pagan Anglo-Saxon barrows in Britain show the Low
German race as pure barbarians, great at destruction,
but incapable of constructive work. Professor
Rolleston, who has opened several of these early heathen
tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhere
abundant evidence of “their great aptness at
destroying, and their great slowness in elaborating,
material civilisation.” Until the Anglo-Saxon
received from the Continent the Christian religion
and the Roman culture, he was a mere average Aryan
barbarian, with a strong taste for war and plunder,
but with small love for any of the arts of peace.
Wherever else, in Gaul, Spain, or Italy, the Teutonic
barbarians came in contact with the Roman civilisation,
they received the religion of Christ, and the arts
of the conquered people, during or before their conquest
of the country. But in Britain the Teutonic invaders
remained pagans long after their settlement in the
island; and they utterly destroyed, in the south-eastern
tract, almost every relic of the Roman rule and of
the Christian faith. Hence we have here the curious
fact that, during the fifth and sixth centuries, a
belt of intrusive and aggressive heathendom intervenes
between the Christians of the Continent and the Christian
Welsh and Irish of western Britain. The Church
of the Celtic Welsh was cut off for more than a hundred
years from the Churches of the Roman world by a hostile
and impassable barrier of heathen English, Jutes,
and Saxons. Their separation produced many momentous
effects on the after history both of the Welsh themselves
and of their English conquerors.
THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST.
Though the myths which surround the arrival of the
English in Britain have little historical value, they
are yet interesting for the light which they throw
incidentally upon the habits and modes of thought of
the colonists. They have one character in common
with all other legends, that they grow fuller and
more circumstantial the further they proceed from
the original time. Baeda, who wrote about A.D.
700, gives them in a very meagre form: the English
Chronicle, compiled at the court of AElfred, about
A.D. 900, adds several important traditional particulars:
while with the romantic Geoffrey of Monmouth, A.D.
1152, they assume the character of full and circumstantial
tales. The less men knew about the conquest,
the more they had to tell about it.
