A School History of England/Chapter 1

by C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling

Layout 2

 

CHAPTER I

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS

The River’s Tale.

Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young and the Thames was old,
And this is the tale that the River told:—

’I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go and I end my run
At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I’d have you know that these waters of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the East I went
And England was joined to the Continent.

I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent’s Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
He was death to feather and fin and fur,
He trapped my beavers at Westminster,
He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,
He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier;
He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,
Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,
While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin
The tall Phoenician ships stole in,
And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay,
Flashed like dragon-flies Erith way;
And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
And life was gay, and the world was new,
And I was a mile across at Kew!
But the Roman came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in—
And that’s where your history books begin!’

The land we live in.This is to be a short history of all the people who have lived in the British Islands. I have just counted up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of them mere rocks, some as big as small counties; besides England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first there were men in Britain it was not a group of islands, but one stretch of land joining the great continent of Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea were then land through which ran huge European rivers. The land was covered with forests and swamps, and full of wild beasts, some of which have now vanished from the earth, while others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed only 240 years ago; the last in Ireland about 180 years ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of those early times, and perhaps helped to make our flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams. But we know almost nothing about the first men who lived here, except that they were naked and very hairy;

 

 

Perhaps 50,000 years ago. The first men.they slept in trees and lived on raw flesh or fruit, or dug for roots with crooked branches. After a long while, probably thousands of years, the climate got gradually colder and great sheets of ice covered all Northern Europe. Then these first men either died out or went away southwards. Again thousands of years passed, and the west end of Europe got freed of ice and sank several hundred feet, and the sea flooded over the lower parts. So Britain became an island or a group of islands.

Perhaps 10,000 years ago. The Cave men.Then the second race of men came, perhaps in some kind of boats made of skins stretched over bent poles. About this race we do know something. They were jolly, cunning, dark little fellows with long black hair. At first they lived high up on the hills, so that they could see their enemies from a distance. They could cook food, they dug out caves to live in, they made arrows and axes of sharp stones, and so stood a very fair chance of killing the wild beasts. Their brains, though perhaps small compared to ours, were worth all the strength of all the beasts that ever howled at night. No doubt they had still something of the beast in them; they could run very swiftly; could climb trees like monkeys; could smell their enemies and their prey far off. They grew up early and died young. Most of their children died in infancy. Life of the Cave men.They clothed themselves in skins, and at first lived entirely by hunting and fishing. Their whole time was devoted to getting food for themselves and their families. But just think what a lot of things they had to make for themselves. How long it must have taken to polish a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to cut down a tree or to cut up a tough old wolf! How long to make a fish-hook or a needle of bone! How clever and hard-working these men must have been! No doubt there were a few sneaks and lazy wretches then, as there are now, who tried to beg from other people instead of fighting for themselves and their wives. But I fancy such fellows had a worse time of it then than they have now. A man who wouldn't work very soon died.

No doubt there were holidays, too, after a successful hunt; or long lazy summer days, when it was too hot to go out after deer or bison, and when even the women laid aside their everlasting skin-stitching and told each other stories of their babies; and the babies toddled about after butterflies, larger and brighter than the peacocks and tortoiseshells of to-day. I don't suppose that these men thought of Britain as their ‘country’; but they thought of their family or their tribe as something sacred, for which they would fight and die; and the spirit of the good land took hold of them, the smell of the good damp mother-earth, the hum of the wild bees, the rustle of heather and murmur of fern; they made rude songs about it, and carved pictures of their fights on the shoulder-blades of the beasts they had killed. Their animals.As time went on they grew still more cunning, and began to tame the young of some of the beasts, such as puppies, lambs, calves and kids; and they found out the delights of a good drink of milk. And so to the hunting trade they added the shepherds trade, which is a much more paying one. Corn-growing.Then some wonderful fellow discovered how to sow seeds of wheat, or some other corn; and that these, when ripened, gathered and ground to powder, made a delicious food, which we call bread. When that was found out real civilization began; for a third trade was added, that of agriculture, the most paying of all.

Their tribes.So one by one the earth gave up her secrets to our forefathers, and, like Adam and Eve, they went forth to subdue and replenish this Isle of Britain. Each century that passed, they lived longer, were better fed, better housed, used better weapons, killed off more wild beasts. They quarrelled of course, and even killed each other; family often fought with family, tribe with tribe, for they were always breaking the Tenth Commandment. But such quarrels were not perpetual; tribe might often join with tribe, and so begin to form one nation or people. How they were governed, what their laws and customs were, what their religious ideas were, we can only guess. Their kings.Perhaps the eldest man of the tribe was a sort of king and declared what were the ‘customs’ which the tribe must keep; said ‘this would make the gods angry’ and that would not; settled the disputes about a sheep or piece of corn-land; led the tribe to fight in battle. Perhaps this king pretended to be descended from the gods, and his tribe got to believe it.

Their gods.Who were the gods? Sun, moon, stars, rivers, trees, lakes; the rain, the lightning, the clouds; perhaps certain animals; dead ancestors, if they had been brave men, would come to be counted gods. But all round you were gods and spirits of some sort, whom you must appease by sacrifices, or by absurd customs. ‘Do not cut your hair by moonlight, or the goddess of the moon will be angry.’ ‘If you are the King, never cut your hair at all.’ ‘Luck’ perhaps was the origin of many of such customs; some famous man hud once cut his hair by moonlight, and next day he had been struck by lightning. Then there were priests, or ‘medicine-men’ of some kind. These would generally support the king; but they would often bully him also, and try to make him enforce absurd customs.

Their buildings.And so the ages rolled along, and these ‘Cave men’ or ‘Stone Age men’ began to thin the forests a little, or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest fires. They began to come down from the hilltops, on which their earliest homes had been made, into the valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and began to build themselves villages of little wooden huts; they began to make regular beaten track-ways along the slopes of the downs; they began, perhaps, to raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods. Was it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins, even now, strike us with wonder and terror?

Their trade with foreigners.Tribe began to exchange its goods with tribe; the flints of Sussex for the deer horns of Devon, for deer horns make excellent pickaxes. Foreign traders came too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps to buy slaves. Our ancestors were quite willing to sell their fellow men, captives taken in war from other tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not very clear; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as we now sell to savages; perhaps casks of strong drink; perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons of bronze; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that there were richer and more civilized men than themselves living beyond the seas, who had things which they lacked; and, as they coveted such things, they had to make or catch something to buy them with. Therefore they bred more big dogs, killed and skinned more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in Britain, and its benefits came first to those dwellers of the southern and south-eastern coasts who were nearest to the ports of Europe.

Perhaps 3,000 years ago.But the foreign traders also took home with them the report that Britain looked a fertile country, and was quite worth conquering. Coming of the Celts.And so, perhaps about a thousand years before Christ, a set of new tribes began to cross the Channel, and to land in our islands, not as traders, but as fighters. Terrible big fellows they were, with fair hair, and much stronger than the Stone Age men. They were armed, too, with this new-fangled bronze, which made short work of our poor little bows and flint-tipped arrows and spears. Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once, fled to the forests, fled ever northwards or westwards, or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterwards married their conquerors. The Celts, for that was the name of the new people, seized all the best land, all the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the hill-tops, and began to lead in Britain the life which they had been leading for several centuries in the country we now call France. From these Celts the Scottish, Irish and Welsh people are mainly descended.

Life of the Celts.They rode on war-ponies, and, like the Assyrians in the the Bible, they drove war-chariots; they knew, or were soon taught by foreign traders, how to dig in the earth for minerals, and they soon did a large trade in that valuable metal, tin, which is found in Cornwall. They were in every way more civilized than the Stone Age men; their gods were fiercer and stronger; their priests, called Druids, more powerful; their tribes were much larger and better organized for war. Their methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep and cow breeding, were much better; their trade with their brothers in France was far greater. Before they, in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the use of iron for tools and weapons. Flint had gone down before bronze; so now bronze, which is a soft metal and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the cheap and hard grey iron. He who has the best tools will win in the fight with Nature; he who has the best weapons will beat his fellow men in battle.

Growth of empires in distant lands.Meanwhile, far away in the East, great empires had been growing up and decaying for six or seven thousand years. Each contributed something to civilization, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece; each in turn made a bid for conquering and civilizing the ‘known world’. But the world that they knew stretched little beyond the warm and tideless Mediterranean Sea. Rome.After all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress and conqueror of all these civilizations and empires. Rome brought to her task a genius for war and government which none of them had known. The Roman armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France, and from France they passed to Britain. Caesar's Invasion of Britain, 55, 54 B.C.The greatest of Roman soldiers, Caius Julius Caesar, who was conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in Kent, about fifty years before Christ's birth. He found it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which he crossed a little above London; tough, almost as much because of the forests as because of the valiant Britons, although in the open field these were no match for the disciplined Roman regiments called ‘legions’. It is this Caesar who wrote the first account of our island and our people which has come down to us. He was very much astonished at the tide which he found in the Channel; and his book leaves us with the impression that the spirit of the dear motherland had breathed valour and cunning in defence into the whole British people.

THE LANDING OF THE ROMANS

 

Second Roman Invasion A.D. 43.For ninety years after his raid no Roman armies came to the island. But Roman traders came and Romanized Celts from France, who laughed at the ‘savage’ ways of the British Celts. Men began to talk, in the wooden or wattle huts of British kings (hitherto believed by the Britons to be the most magnificent buildings imaginable), of the name and fame of the great Empire, of streets paved with marble, and of houses roofed with gilded bronze; of the invincible Roman legions clad in steel and moving like steel machines; of the great paved roads driven like arrows over hill and dale, through the length and breadth of Western Europe, of the temples and baths, of the luxurious waterways of the South. Rome attracted and terrified many peoples, even before she conquered them. The Roman Emperor seemed to men who had never seen him to be a very god upon earth.

The Roman Conquest.But the Roman conquest began in earnest in the year 43, and within half a century was fairly complete. At first it was cruel; Roman soldiers were quite pitiless; for those who resisted they had only the sword or slavery. The north and west of Britain resisted long and hard and often. Once under the great Queen, Boadicea, whose statue now stands on Westminster Bridge in London, the Britons cut to pieces a whole Roman legion. Then came cruel vengeance and reconquest; but after reconquest came such peace and good government as Britain had never seen before. The Peace that Rome gave.The Romans introduced into all their provinces a system of law so fair and so strong, that almost all the best laws of modern Europe have been founded on it. Everywhere the weak were protected against the strong; castles were built on the coast with powerful garrisons in them; fleets patrolled the Channel and the North Sea. Great roads crossed the island from east to west and from north to south. Great cities, full of all the luxuries of the South, grew up. Temples were built to the Roman gods; and country-houses of rich Roman gentlemen, of which you may still see the remains here and there. These gentlemen at first talked about exile, shivered and cursed the ‘beastly British climate’, heated their houses with hot air, and longed to get home to Italy. But many stayed; their duty or their business obliged them to stay: and into them too the spirit of the dear motherland entered, and became a passion. Their children, perhaps, never saw Rome; but Rome and Britain had an equal share of their love and devotion, and they, perhaps, thought something like this:—

The Roman Centurion Speaks:

A Roman soldier who loves Britain.Legate, I had the news last night. My cohort’s ordered home
By ship to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome.
I’ve marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below:
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!

I’ve served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done,
Here where my dearest dead are laid—my wife—my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how shall I remove?

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze,
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

You’ll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean
To Arelate’s triple gate; but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!

Youll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacocks neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
Youll go where laurel crowns are won, but will you eer forget
Tre scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?

Let me work here for Britain's sake—at any task you will—
A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep.

Legate, I come to you in tears—My cohort ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind—the only life I know.—
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

 

Mixture of British and Roman races.And peace was imposed all over Southern Britain; and the legions came to be stationed only on the frontier, and hardly ever moved. No doubt at first these legions were recruited from all the regions over which Rome ruled; and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been recruited in Britain itself and from Britons. Celtic mothers bore British sons to Roman fathers, and crooned Celtic songs over the cradles of babies, who would one day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue, which the Romans had brought with them, was enriched with many Celtic words.

What Rome failed to do.It was, however, a misfortune for Britain that Rome never conquered the whole island. The great warrior, Agricola, did, between A.D. 79 and 85, penetrate far into Scotland; but he could leave no traces of civilization behind him, and Ireland he never touched at all. So Ireland never went to school, and has been a spoilt child ever since; the most charming of children, indeed, full of beautiful laughter and tender tears, full of poetry and valour, but incapable of ruling herself, and impatient of all rule by others. Then there was always a ‘Scottish frontier’ to be guarded, and along this frontier the Emperor Hadrian, early in the second century, began the famous Roman Wall. The Roman Wall.His successors improved on it until it became a mighty rampart of stone, eighty miles long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers.

To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched, certainly unsubdued, the wilder Celts whom the Romans called ‘Picts’ or painted men; the screen of the wall seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these. But prosperity and riches are often bad for men; they lead to the neglect of defence. I fear that Roman Britain went to sleep behind her wall, recruiting fell off, the strength of the legions became largely a ‘paper strength’.

Decay of Roman power after A. D. 300.And not only in Britain. The greatest empire that the world has ever seen was slowly dying at the heart, dying of too much power, too much prosperity, too much luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day! There were pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, land-thieves and sea-thieves. They began to break through the frontiers. Invasions of the Picts.One fine day the terrible news came to York, the capital of Roman Britain, that the Picts were over the wall. Where was the commander-in-chief? Oh! he was at Bath, taking the waters to cure his indigestion. Where was the prefect (the highest representative of the Emperor)? Oh! he lived at Lyons in Southern France; for he governed France as well as Britain. Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down to Italy to make himself Emperor! If so, he would be for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain instead of sending more to defend it. ‘A few barbarians more or less over the wall’ mattered very little to a man who lived by neglecting his duties in Southern France; ‘they could easily be driven back next year.’

Fall of Roman Britain.But it soon came to be less easy, and the barbarians soon came to be more than a few. An officer, called the ‘Count of the Saxon Shore’, was created to watch against the pirates. The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for themselves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome, Britain and civilization were equally coming to an end, and it would be long before they revived. Half a century had completed the Roman conquest of the

 

THE BUILDING OF THE WALL

 

island; two and a half centuries of happy peace had followed, in another half-century it was all over. Long before the last Roman legions were withdrawn in 407, pirates had been breaking down all the walls and defences of Britain. The English pirates from North Germany, about A. D. 350–450.Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic Scots from Ireland; worse than all, down the north-east wind came terrible ‘Englishmen’, ‘Saxons’, from the shores of North Germany and Denmark. Rome had forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves with rabbits and lambs; now they were going to feast once more upon the corpses of men.