But the English conquest of Britain up to the point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom the English conquered.  It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the Roman civilization.  Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to be found in the Imperial provinces of the West.  What really made the difference between the fate of Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the stubborn courage of the British themselves.  In all the world-wide struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly won.  In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or Visigoth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne.  No popular revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric in Italy.  But in Britain the invader was met by a courage almost equal to his own.  Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fellows abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute, the English had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard fighting.

This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural obstacles of the gravest kind.  Elsewhere in the Roman world the work of the conquerors was aided by the very civilization of Rome.  Vandal and Frank marched along Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed river or ravine on the Roman bridge.  It was so doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain.  But though Britain had long been Roman, her distance from the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any other province of the West.  Socially the Roman civilization had made little impression on any but the townsfolk, and the material civilization of the island was yet more backward than its social.  Its natural defences threw obstacles in its invaders’ way.  In the forest belts which stretched over vast spaces of country they found barriers which in all cases checked their advance and in some cases finally stopped it.  The Kentishmen and the South-Saxons were brought utterly to a standstill by the Andredsweald.  The East-Saxons could never pierce the woods of their western border.  The Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the Southfolk of East-Anglia.  It was only after a long and terrible struggle that the West-Saxons could hew their way through the forests which sheltered the “Gwent” of the southern coast.  Their attempt to break out of the circle of woodland which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless for thirty years; and in the height of their later power they were thrown back from the forests of Cheshire.