A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance. J. J. Jusserand

Britons who had taken to the toga—"frequens toga," says Tacitus—and who were no longer protected by the legions, made a vain resistance; the advancing tide of barbarians swept over them, they ceased to exist as a nation. Contributions were levied on the cities, the country was laid waste, villas were razed to the ground, and on all the points where the natives endeavoured to face the enemy, fearful hecatombs were slaughtered by the worshippers of Woden.

      They could not, however, destroy all; and here comes in the important question of Celtic survival. Some admirers of the conquerors credit them with superhuman massacres. According to them no Celt survived; and the race, we are told, was either driven back into Wales or destroyed, so that the whole land had to be repopulated, and that a new and wholly Germanic nation, as pure in blood as the tribes on the banks of the Elbe, grew up on British soil. But if facts are examined it will be found that this title to glory cannot be claimed for the invaders. The deed was an impossible one; let that be their excuse. To destroy a whole nation by the sword exceeds human power, and there is no example of it. We know, besides, that in this case the task would have been an especially hard one, for the population of Britain, even at the time of Cæsar, was dense: hominum infinita multitudo, he says in his Commentaries. The invaders, on the other hand, found themselves in presence of an intelligent, laborious, assimilable race, trained by the Romans to usefulness. The first of these facts precludes the hypothesis of a general massacre; and the second the hypothesis of a total expulsion, or of such extinction as threatens the inassimilable native of Australia.

In reality, all the documents which have come down to us, and all the verifications made on the ground, contradict the theory of an annihilation of the Celtic race. To begin with, we can imagine no systematic destruction after the introduction of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons, which took place at the end of the sixth century. Then, the chroniclers speak of a general massacre of the inhabitants, in connection with two places only: Chester and Anderida.[34] We can ascertain even to-day that in one of these cases the destruction certainly was complete, since this last town was never rebuilt, and only its site is known. That the chroniclers should make a special mention of the two massacres proves these cases were exceptional. To argue from the destruction of Anderida to the slaughter of the entire race would be as little reasonable as to imagine that the whole of the Gallo-Romans were annihilated because the ruins of a Gallo-Roman city, with a theatre seating seven thousand people have been discovered in a spot uninhabited to-day, near Sanxay in Poictou. Excavations recently made in England have shown, in a great number of cemeteries, even in the region termed Littus Saxonicum, where the Germanic population was densest, Britons and Saxons sleeping side by side, and nothing could better point to their having lived also side by side. Had a wholesale massacre taken place, the victims would have had no sepulchres, or at all events they would not have had them amongst those of the slayers.

In addition to this, it is only by the preservation of the pre-established race that the change in manners and customs, and the rapid development of the Anglo-Saxons can be explained. These roving pirates lose their taste for maritime adventure; they build no more ships; their intestine quarrels are food sufficient for what is left of their warlike appetites. Whence comes it that the instincts of this impetuous race are to some degree moderated? Doubtless from the quantity and fertility of the land they had conquered, and from the facility they found on the spot for turning that land to account. These facilities consisted in the labour of others. The taste for agriculture did not belong to the race. Tacitus represents the Germans as cultivating only what was strictly necessary.[35] The Anglo-Saxons found in Britain wide tracts of country tilled by romanised husbandmen; after the time of the first ravages they recalled them to their toil, but assigned its fruits to themselves. Well, therefore, might the same word be used by the conquerors to designate the native Celt and the slave. They established themselves in the fields, and superintended their cultivation after their fashion; their encampments became boroughs: Nottingham, Buckingham, Glastonbury, which have to the present day retained the names of Germanic families or tribes. The towns of more ancient importance, on the contrary, have retained Celtic or Latin names: London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, Dover, Cirencester, Manchester, &c.[36] The Anglo-Saxons did not destroy them, since they are still extant, and only mingled in a feeble proportion with their population, having, like all Germans, a horror of sojourning in cities. "They avoided them, regarding them as tombs," they thought that to live in towns was like burying oneself alive.[37] The preservation in England of several branches of Roman industry is one proof more of the continuance of city life in the island; had the British artisans not survived the invasion, there would never have been found in the tombs of the conquerors those glass cups of elaborate ornamentation, hardly distinguishable from the products of the Roman glass-works, and which the clumsy hands of the Saxon were certainly incapable of fusing and adorning.[38]

      The Britons, then, subsist in large numbers, even in the eastern and southern counties, where the Germanic settlement was most dense, but they subsist as a conquered race; they till the ground in the country, and in the cities occupy themselves with manual labour. Wales and Cornwall alone, in the isle of Britain, were still places of refuge for independent Celts. The idiom and traditions of the ancient inhabitants were there preserved. In these distant retreats, at the foot of Snowdon, in the valley of St. David's, beneath the trees of Caerleon, popular singers accompany on their harps the old national poems; perhaps they even begin to chaunt those tales telling of the exploits of a hero destined to the highest renown in literature, King Arthur.

      But in the heart of the country the national tongue had been for a long time constantly losing ground; the Britons had learnt Latin, many of them; they now forget it by degrees, as they had previously forgotten Celtic, and learn instead the language of their new masters. It was one of their national gifts, a precious and fatal one; they were swift to learn.

In France the result of the Germanic conquest was totally different; the Celtic language reappeared there no more than in England. It has only survived in the extreme west.[39] But in France the Germanic idiom did not overpower the Latin; the latter persisted, so much so that the French tongue has remained a Romance language. This is owing to two great causes. Firstly, the Germans came to France in much smaller numbers than to England, and those that remained had been long in contact with the Romans; secondly, the romanising of Gaul had been more complete. Of all the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, the birthplace of Cornelius Gallus, Trogus Pompeius, Domitius Afer, Petronius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, prided itself on speaking the purest Latin, and on producing the best poets. Whether we take material monuments or literary ones, the difference is the same in the two countries. In England theatres, towers, temples, all marks of Latin civilisation, had been erected, but not so numerous, massive, or strong that the invaders were unable to destroy them. At the present time only shapeless remnants exist above ground. In France, the barbarians came, plundered, burnt, razed to the ground all they possibly could; but the work of destruction was too great, the multitude of temples and palaces was more than their strength was equal to, and the torch fell from their tired hands. Whereas in England excavations are made in order to discover the remains of ancient Latin civilisation, in France we need only raise our eyes to behold them. Could the grave give up a Roman of the time of the Cæsars, he would still at this day be able to worship his divine emperors in the temples of Nîmes and Vienne; pass, when entering Reims, Orange, or Saintes under triumphal arches erected by his ancestors; he might recognise their tombs at the "Aliscamps" of Arles; could see Antigone played at Orange, and seated on the gradines of the amphitheatre, facing the blue horizon of Provence, still behold blood flowing in the arena.

      Gaul was not, like Britain, disorganised and deprived of its legions when the Germanic hordes appeared; the victor had to reckon with the vanquished; the latter became not a slave but an ally, and this advantage, added to that of superior numbers and civilisation, allowed the Gallo-Roman to reconquer the invader. Latin tradition was so powerful