[Illustration:  The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]

For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to the settlement of his conqueror.  What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome.  In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman.  Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the past.  The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it.  Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities.  Roman camps still crowned hill and down.  The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers.  The Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of priest and lord.  But Rome was gone.  The mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a world which our fathers’ sword swept utterly away.  Its law, its literature, its manners, its faith, went with it.  Nothing was a stronger proof of the completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than the religious change which passed over the land.  Alone among the German assailants of Rome the English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow.  The new England was a heathen country.  Homestead and boundary, the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced Christ.

As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse to the land over which it passed.  But if the new England which sprang from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had been destroyed.  The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by tyranny, political and social, into serfdom.  The base of the new English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting for himself by the Northern Sea.  However roughly he dealt with the material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer.  War in fact was no sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he had burned.  The settlement of the English in the conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English society in its completest form to the soil of Britain.  The slowness of their advance, the small numbers of each separate