A School History of England/Chapter 2
,_p.25.jpg)
Emery Walker sc.
CHAPTER II
SAXON ENGLAND
The Pirates in England.
And the sceptre passed from her hand,
The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall
To harry the British land.
So quick to laughter and tears,
They came panting with hate and haste
For the loot of five hundred years.
They ruined temple and town—
They swept like wolves through the standing crops
Crying that Rome was down.
Of beauty and strength and worth,
But they could not wipe out the Viking’s Wind,
That brings the ships from the North.
Nor what those gales set free—
The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails,
Leaping from sea to sea.
Seen nearer and more plain,
Dipping into the troughs like a gull,
And gull-like rising again—
In the high snake-headed stem,
Searching the beach while her sail comes down,
They had forgotten them!
To meet her hand to hand,
As she took the beach with a surge and a roar,
And the pirates rushed inland.
The British Christians.Early in the fourth century the Roman Empire had become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire. One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was afterwards dedicated. It is probable, however, that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, Britain was divided into bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down.
The heathen Saxons and English.Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent—you might almost say conscientious—heathens. They feared and and hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civilization; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, were also being overrun by barbarians, but none of these were as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore, in Italy, France and Spain, the ‘re-making’ of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westwards to the Severn. An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked. ‘Some therefore of the miserable remnant (of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great numbers, others constrained by famine came and yielded themselves to be slaves for ever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offered them: others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations.’
The Saxon Conquest, A.D. 400–600.The Saxons brought their wives and children with them, though it is difficult to believe that they were so stupid as to kill all the Britons instead of enslaving them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not done this, surely there would have been some traces left of Latin or Celtic speech, law and religion. But there were practically none. When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely English language; while, as for religion, the people have to be converted all over again by a special mission from the Pope at Rome.
Ruin of civilization.Probably the British made a very desperate defence, and were only slowly beaten westwards into Wales, Lancashire, Devon and Cornwall. Something like two centuries passed before the English were thorough masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that while Roman temples, churches, roads and cities were crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins. Studying the history of those days is like looking at a battle-field in a fog. As the fog clears we get some notion of our dear barbarian forefathers.
Life of the Saxons.The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with the vices and cruelties of an overgrown boy; a drunkard and a gambler, and very stupid. But he was a truth-teller, a brave, patient, and cool-headed fellow. A Roman historian describes him as ‘a free-necked man married to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses kick’. He honoured his women and he loved his home: and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more than into any of those who lived before or came after him. He never knew when he was beaten, and so he took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to Britain, so completely that within two centuries his coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe; and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the north-east wind. It blows her no good.
The Saxon plough-boy.Tilling the fields was the Saxons real job; he was a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature, and like a true plough- and cow-boy he was always grumbling. He hated being governed; he always stood up for his ‘rights’, and often talked a lot of nonsense about them. He obeyed his Kings when he pleased, which was not often, and these Kings had very little power over him. But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it with his clumsy plough. In the sweat of his brow he ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much of the beer) which he raised on it.
A Saxon village.Every English village could keep itself to itself, since it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except salt, iron and millstones, which could only be found in certain favoured places. In most villages there was a sort of squire called a ‘thegn’, who paid something, either a rent or a service of some kind, to a king or to a bigger then, and owned much more land than the ordinary freemen. Probably also he owned a few slaves, whether of English or British birth. There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century there was also in most villages a priest. Of the freemen, every head of a family owned certain strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen. There was also a great common on which all freemen could pasture their cattle, and a wood wherein the pigs fed. There were few horses—there was no hay to feed them on—cows were only killed for food when they were too old to draw the plough, sheep were chiefly kept for wool, and so the pig was the real friend of hungry men.
The small Saxon kingdoms.There was in each district some sort of rude government by some sort of rude king, whose ancestor may have been a leading pirate of the first ship-load of Saxons who landed near that place. No doubt many tiny ‘kingdoms’ sprang up, as ship-load after ship-load of pirates explored and settled inland. Probably the first ‘kingdoms’ extended as far as an armed man could walk before a day's honest fighting, but these would naturally melt into, or be conquered into larger territories. In the seventh century there were at least seven little kingdoms, but, by the eighth, only three of any importance remained.
The three large Saxon kingdoms.1. Northumbria, stretching from the Forth to the Humber, and westwards to the hills that part Cumberland and Lancashire from Yorkshire and Northumberland.
2. Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the Humber to the Thames and westward to the Severn.
3. Wessex, comprising all south of the Thames and as far west as Devon.
When they were tired of fighting the Britons the kings of these small kingdoms constantly fought each other.
Their government; their gods.There were laws, or rather deeply-rooted ‘customs’, mostly connected with fighting, or cows or ploughing. There were rude courts of Justice, which would fine a man so many sheep or so many silver pennies for murder or wounding or cow-stealing. The King had a council of ‘wise men’, who met in his wooden house to advise him, and to drink with him afterwards at his rude feasts. There were gods, called Tiu and Woden and Thor and Freya, from whom our Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are derived. They lived in a heaven called Valhalla, where, our ancestors thought, there was an endless feast of pork and strong ale with no headaches to follow.
A barbarous freedom.All this, as you see, was a barbarous business, after the well-organized, civilized Roman life; but at least it was a life with a good deal of freedom in it. Rome had stifled freedom too much; the Saxons went to the other extreme. It is quite possible to have too much freedom, and you will see what a price these Saxons, before the end of their six hundred years of freedom, had to pay for theirs.
The Saxon foundations of England.After the sack of the City when Rome was sunk to a name,
In the years when the lights were darkened, or ever St. Wilfred came,
Low on the borders of Britain (the ancient poets sing)
Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon King.
Stubborn were all his people from cottar to overlord,
Not to be cowed by the cudgel, scarce to be schooled by the sword,
Quick to turn at their pleasure, cruel to cross in their mood,
And set on paths of their choosing as the hogs of Andred’s Wood.
Laws they made in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine—
Common, loppage and pannage, the theft and the track of kine,
Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
The tax on the Bramber packhorse, and the tax on the Hastings
keel.
Over the graves of the Druids and under the wreck of Rome,
Rudely but surely they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Normans’ ire,
Rudely but greatly begat they the bones of state and of shire;
Rudely but deeply they laboured, and their labour stands till now,
If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.
Growth of great land-owners.There was no king really powerful enough to rule the whole island. In a land of forest and swamp, where roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to pass from place to place, except on horseback; and the Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we shall see that it was the knight and his horse, who, from the eleventh century onwards, first made the rule of one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile, the ‘great men’ of the Saxons, ‘thegns’, ‘aldermen’, ‘earls’, or whatever they were called, took most of the power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their own hands; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents and services from the poorer landowners; they made what is called a ‘feudal’ state of society. In the year 600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120 acres of land; in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and for this he probably had to pay a heavy rent and to labour on some great man’s land.
The Saxons become Christian after A. D. 597.The first rudiments of civilization were brought back to this barbarous England by the Christian missionaries whom Pope Gregory sent thither in the year 597. St. Augustine came and preached in Kent and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canterbury missionaries spread all over the island, and, in a century, the heathenism, that had rooted out Christianity two hundred years before, was quite gone. It seems that the fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. Bishops and monks.The old Roman capital of York recovered its importance and became an archbishopric. Some seventeen other bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monasteries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who retires from the world in order to devote himself to prayer with a view to saving his own soul.
Gifts of land to the monks.Besides preaching the true Gospel of Our Lord, these missionaries preached the worship of saints, and every church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land to a monastery was called ‘a gift to God and His saints’. If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery, ,_p.34.jpg)
ST. AUGUSTINE PREACHING TO ETHELBERT
Life of the monks.Human love and common sense were too strong to be taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this more intelligently than most people; and so the monasteries became very rich. I think it is to the monks that we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers. And also our love of fishing; the Church said you were to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on other ‘fast-days’, and so every monastery, however far from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old monks, in their thick black woollen frocks with their sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I hope they were always strictly truthful as to the size of the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks also kept alive what remains of learning there were: they brought books from beyond the seas; they taught schools; made musical instruments, were builders, painters and craftsmen of all kinds; and produced famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English missionaries went from English abbeys to preach the Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did the Church become, that in the councils of our tenth-century kings the bishops and abbots were even more important than the thegns and earls.
Power of the Kings of Northumbria, 630–750.The Church then taught men much and tamed them a little. It certainly helped towards uniting the jarring kingdoms; for Christian Northumbria, in the seventh century, was the first to exercise a real sort of leadership over the other Kingdoms; it was a Northumbrian king, Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh; it was in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow that the good monk Bede wrote the first history of England. You may still see Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral, with the Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important Northumbrian king fell fighting against the Picts beyond the Forth.
Kings of Mercia, 750–800.Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the eighth century, under King Offa, who drove back the Welsh and took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps it was he who built a great rampart there called Offa's Dyke; beyond it, even to this day, all is ‘Wales’. Egbert, King of Wessex, 802.Then his family in turn was beaten by Egbert, King of Wessex (802–39). Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name at least, supreme over all England. If ever there was a capital city of England before Norman times it was Winchester, the chief town of Wessex; though London, one of the few Roman cities that have never been ,_p.37.jpg)
New Pirates from Denmark and Norway, 800–1100.Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new and terrible foe. Down the north-east wind, from Denmark, Norway and the Baltic, all through the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce and cunning pirates began to pour upon Western Europe. We call them ‘the Danes’, or North-men. The British Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another they harried them from end to end. The churches, in which the principal wealth of the country was stored, were sacked; the monks were killed, and then the pirates went back to their ships. From Britain they went on to France and even into the Mediterranean: some of them, indeed, crossed the Northern ocean to Iceland, to Greenland, to North America. Their ships, some 80 feet long, and 16 feet broad, with a draft of 4 feet, might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth in shirts of mail, and bearing heavy axes with shafts as long as a man. Often they came under pretence of trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if they thought the country too strong to be attacked. These Pirates begin to settle in England about 860.About the middle of the ninth century they began to settle, and make homes in the very lands they had been plundering. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, were regularly colonized by them. So were the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, Caithness and Sutherland, as well as the Isle of Man and the eastern coast of Ireland.
Their numbers were, however, small, and if Saxon England under weak kings had not enjoyed too much ‘freedom’, they might have been beaten off; but it seemed impossible for the Saxons to collect an army in less than a month, or to keep it in the field when collected. Long before the English ‘host’ was ready to fight, the pirates had harried the land and disappeared. Alfred the Great saves Southern England, 871–901.At last Alfred the Great (871-901), grandson of Egbert, began to turn the tide against the invaders. He defended Wessex all along the line of the Upper Thames, in battle after desperate battle, and at last beat a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire. The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a Christian, and was allowed to settle with his men in North-Eastern England. Soon after that we find English and ‘settled’ Danes fighting valiantly for their country against fresh bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred the first real ‘King of England’; he picked up the threads of the national life which the Danes had cut to pieces. He translated good books into the Saxon tongue; he started the great history of England, called the ‘Chronicle’, which was kept year by year, in more than one monastery, down to 1154. The great Kings of Wessex of the tenth century.He and his son, Edward, and his grandsons, Athelstan and Edmund, built fleets and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled them to fight in their own defence. For some years every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception, and every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten down. King Edgar, 959–75, was called ‘the peaceful’, and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river Dee by six lesser Kings.
It was a brief respite,
Denmark's grim ravens cowered their wings;
and in the reign of Edgar's foolish son, Ethelred the King Ethelred the Unready, 979–1016; fresh Danish raids.Unready, the pirates came back more determined than before. Sweyn, King of Denmark, came in person, and his son Canute; and this time the Danes intended a thorough and wholesale conquest. This time Wessex fell also; even Canterbury was sacked, and its archbishop pelted to death with beef-bones after dinner. The ‘wise men’ of unwise Ethelred were as useless as the House of Commons would be to-day if there were a big invasion. They talked, but did nothing. A country in such a plight wants a man to lead it to war; not thirty ‘wise men’ or six hundred members of Parliament, with a sprinkling of traitors among them, to discuss how to make peace. Ethelred’s ‘wise men’ could only recommend him to buy off the Danes with hard cash called ‘Danegold’ or ‘Danegeld’. The ‘Dane-geld.’The Danes pocketed the silver pennies, laughed, and came back for more. When for a moment there arose a hero, Ethelred’s son Edmund Ironside, he fought in one year, as Alfred had fought, six pitched battles and almost beat Canute. King Canute, 1016–1035.Then he agreed to divide the island with Canute, and was murdered in the next year (1017). Canute ruled England until his death in 1035. He ruled Denmark and Norway also, and was in fact a sort of Northern Emperor.
What ‘Dane-geld’ means.
To call upon a neighbour and to say:—
‘We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.’
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
To puff and look important and to say:—
‘Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you,
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.’
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!’
And Canute ruled England righteously. He turned Christian, he rebuilt the abbeys and churches which his ancestors had burned, he kept a strong little army of English or Danish soldiers about his person, and he kept order and peace. His sons, however, were good for nothing; King Edward the Confessor, 1042–1066.and in 1042 Edward, the younger son of Ethelred, was recalled from ‘Normandy’, whither he had been sent to be out of Canute’s way, and ruled Eneland as king till 1066.
Dangers from abroad.Now, as we approach the end of the Saxon period of our history, let us take a look at our foreign neighbours.
Those who will be important to us are four in number.
1. Denmark and Norway; except in the reign of Canute, these were always hostile.
Scotland.2. Scotland, once Pict-land, the district north of the Forth and Clyde. Celtic ‘Scots’ from Ireland had con- quered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century. They had brought with them the Christian faith, which had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth century. These Scots and Picts continually raided Northumbria just as the Picts had raided Roman Britain; and Canute had bought off their raids by giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed, which thus became the ‘border’, as we have it to-day, between England and Scotland. Cumberland and Lancashire seem to have remained an independent Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just as Wales did till the thirteenth.
Flanders.3. Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the modern Holland and Belgium; a land already famous both for pirates and traders; it lies right opposite the mouth of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of English churches.
Normandy and the Normans.4. Normandy, the great province on the north coast of France, of which the river Seine is the centre. This land the great Danish pirate, Rollo, had harried early in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France gave it him to keep, on condition that he would become a Christian. The ‘Normans’, that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Normans’ duty to take if possible.
Duke William.Now King Edward was at heart more a Norman than an Englishman, so pious that he was called ‘the Confessor’, always weeping over imaginary sins, and forgetting his real sin, which was the neglect of the defence of his island. Like the Normans, he despised his own people. He gave himself away to his young cousin, Duke William of Normandy, and would have liked to give the crown and land of England as well—in fact he made some sort of promise to do so—and he filled his court with Norman favourites and bishops. England had never yet been a united country. Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great ‘aldermen’ or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria, one for Mercia, one for Wessex; Edward continued the same plan, and so these great earls were more powerful than the King himself. Northumbria and Mercia were largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark than to Wessex for a king. It was on Wessex, then, that the main resistance to Normandy would fall if the Normans attacked England.
Earl Harold of Wessex.Edward had no children, and as he drew towards his death, the great Earl Harold of Wessex had to make up his mind whether he would submit to Duke William of Normandy, or call in Danish help, or seize the crown of England for himself. Ambition and patriotism both said ‘Seize it’; Becomes King, 1066.and on Edward's death, in January 1066, Harold did so.
Invasions prepared from Norway and Normandy.Danes and Norwegians were on the alert too; and it looked as if England might be crushed between two sets of enemies. For William had long been preparing for a spring at it: he had won the friendship of Flanders; and he had the Pope on his side, for the English Church was by no means too obedient to the Pope at this time.
,_p.43.jpg)
Battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066, September.Harold, then, had to prepare to meet two invasions; and most gallantly he met them. He flew to York, smashed the Norwegians to pieces at Stamford Bridge, and flew south again: but before he reached London William had landed in Sussex. Battle of Hastings, 1006, October.There, upon October 14, on or near the spot where Battle Abbey now stands, was fought the battle of Hastings, one of the most decisive battles in history. It was the fight of French cavalry and archers against the English and Danish foot-soldiers and axe-men, a fight of valour and cunning against valour without cunning. All day they fought, till, in the autumn darkness, the last of Harolds axemen had fallen beside their dying King, and the few English survivors had fled towards London. One of them left a bag of coins in a ditch at Sedlescombe, which was dug out a few years ago; the poor little silver pieces are a token of the many foreign countries with which Old England had dealings.
Results of the Norman Conquest.The battle of Hastings decided, though not even William knew it, that the great, slow, dogged, English race, was to be governed and disciplined (and at first severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken, unenterprising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the scruff of the neck into the family of European nations, back into close touch with the Roman Church, to which a series of vigorous and clever popes was then giving a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of government and order as were left in Europe were saved for us by the Normans. The great Roman empire was like a ship that had been wrecked on a beach; its cargo was plundered by nation after nation. But if any nation had got the lion’s snare of its leavings it was the Frenchmen, and through the Frenchmen the Normans, and through the Normans the English.
The Conquest completed, 1066–1072.It cost William about six years of utterly ruthless warfare to become master of all England. England resisted him bit by bit; its leaders had a dozen different plans; he had but one plan, and he drove it through. He was going to make an England that would resist the next invader as one people. He had to do terrible things: he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert; he had to drive all the bravest English leaders into forest and fen, or over the Scottish border, and to kill them when he caught them. He spared no man who stood In his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy. He could not subdue Scotland; but once he marched to the Tay and brought the Scottish King Malcolm to his knees for the time.
The great Norman landowners.William could not quite give up the plan of governing England by great earls; he was obliged to reward the most powerful of his French followers with huge grants of English land; and these followers, who had been quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy, often rebelled against him and his descendants in England. But his gifts of land were nearly always scattered in such a way that one great man might have land perhaps in ten different counties, but not too much in any one place. Besides, every landowner, big or little, had to swear a strong oath to be faithful to the King. All gifts of land were to come only from the King, all courts of justice should depend upon the King alone. It remained for William's great-grandson Henry II to put all this down in black and white, in ink, on parchment; Henry knew, what even William had not learned, that the pen is a much more terrible and lasting recorder than the sword.
King William I. 1066–1037.In a word, William would be King not only of Wessex but of every rood of English land and of all men dwelling thereon. And so the country began once more to enjoy a peace it had never known since the Roman legions left. The sons of the very men who had fought William at Hastings flew to fight for William against some rebel Norman earl, and earls and other men found that if they wanted to play the game of rebellion they had better go back to France. And the actual number of Normans who remained in England and took root was really very small, though among them we should find nearly all the nobles, bishops, great abbots and other leaders of the people. Very few Norman women came, 80 these men married English wives, and, within 150 years, all difference between Normans and Englishmen had vanished. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was the beginning of the history of the English race as one people and of England as a great power in Europe. You might say, indeed— England’s on the anvil—hear the hammers ring—
Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne!
Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King—
England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into line!
(But the work will be a marvel when it’s done)
Little bits of Kingdoms cannot stand against their foes.
England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into one!
(Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape!)
It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword.
England’s being hammered, hammered, hammered into shape!