Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1097 page)

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.

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:

Northumbria, stretching from the Forth to the Humber, and westward to the hills that part Cumberland and Lancashire from
Yorkshire and Northumberland.

Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the Humber to the Thames and westward to the Severn.

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.

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 afterward 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.

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.

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 cotter

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,
Statues 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.

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 onward, 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 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. 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.

Besides preaching the true Gospel of our (
Lord, these missionaries preached the worship J
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, the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to give your land to the saints. But this meant that you neglected your worldly duties, such as defending your country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place that the best thing they could do was to get out of it as quickly as possible. The Popes of Rome, who had about this time made themselves supreme heads of all Western Christendom, encouraged this view; and the monks were always devoted servants of the Popes.
But there were other priests who were not monks, and these usually served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly grew up in England; they were always rather jealous 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.

The Church then taught men much and tamed them a little. It certainly helped toward 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.

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.”
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 destroyed or left desolate, must always have been a more important place of trade.
From
Egbert King George V is directly descended!

Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new and terrible foe. Down to 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 draught 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. 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. 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. He and his son