[Sidenote:  Withdrawal of the Britons]

It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well as the moral circumstances of Britain that we can understand the character of its earlier conquest.  Field by field, town by town, forest by forest, the land was won.  And as each bit of ground was torn away by the stranger, the Briton sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly and fight for the next.  There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant so impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the men who held it.  Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like Anderida whose long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers.  But for the most part the Britons were not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew back.  Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slowness of the conquest.  For it is not only the stoutness of its defence which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of the Empire, but the weakness of attack.  As the resistance of the Britons was greater than that of the other provincials of Rome so the forces of their assailants were less.  Attack by sea was less easy than attack by land, and the numbers who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric or Chlodewig across the Alps or the Rhine.  Landing in small parties, and but gradually reinforced by after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and fitfully push the Britons back.  The absence of any joint action among the assailants told in the same way.  Though all spoke the same language and used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any collective enterprise.

[Sidenote:  The English settlement]

Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such countries as Gaul.  How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of bitter warfare.  But it was just through the length of the struggle that of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.  So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.  Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main facts untouched.  The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.  When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.