EARLY ENGLAND.*

 The principle upon which Mr. Traill and nearly a score of well-qualified contributors have begun to write a new history of England is a novel and ingenious one. It is designed to exhibit the gradual evolution of the social, political, religious, and economic life of the country in its consecutive stages ; so that the reader may find himself in much the same position which a geologist might do, if it were possible for him to watch the processes by which the successive stratifications have been brought about, during the long ages which have been occupied by the earth in reaching its present formation. And there is a certain analogy between the building up of the English nation and the construction of the solid island upon which it has made its home. Layer after layer of population has been superimposed upon a possibly autochthonic race, constituting the bed-rock ; and the deposition of each fresh human stratum forms an interesting study in itself to a hundred millions of English-speaking people, who are physically, morally, and intellectually the product of this curiously composite ancestry.

First of all, as Mr. O. M. Edwards remarks in writing of Celtic Britain, a wave of immigrants, short in stature and swarthy in countenance, reached that country from Arabia and from Egypt, along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, as it is believed. They are called Iberians, and their "purest descendants may be seen among the miners of the Rhondda Valley (in Glamorganshire), or in the quadrangles of Jesus College at Oxford." Then came the Celts, Gaelic and Brythonic, fairer, taller, and more civilised than the Iberians. They are supposed to have journeyed through Central Europe ; the language of the first, "still surviving in the Isle of Man, in the west of Ireland, and in the north-west and west of Scotland;" while the Brythonic tongue is still spoken in Brittany and Wales. Rome next brought her legions into Britain, and as they were recruited not merely from Italy, but from every part of her large empire—from Belgium, Batavia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Gaul, Dalmatia, &c., these intermarrying with British wives, or living with British mistresses, would introduce many strains of foreign blood into the already mixed population. One of the contributors points out that "newcomers from any land under the Roman government might settle here. We find a Palmyrene at home under the pale sky of Northumberland, and a Moor or Mauritanian in the service at Ellenborough."

With the fall of the Roman power in Britain there came a great inrush of Teutonic Angles and Saxons, followed in due time by an invasion of Northmen from the Scandinavian peninsula, who conquered and occupied fifteen of the shires, including all those on the eastern coast of England, from the mouth of the Thames  to that of the Tees; and finally the victory of Senlac led to the introduction and supremacy of a Norman king, a Norman nobility, and a Norman army; belonging to a race, it is observed, which possessed "the very qualities that England yet lacked—the power of organisation, the sense of law and method, and the genius for enterprise." Nor did the process of miscegenation end here. There was a considerable influx of Flemish weavers, in the reign of Edward the Third, who settled in the Eastern counties, at the invitation of that monarch, and laid the foundation of our great woollen industries; the now diminutive village of Worsted, in Norfolk, marking the former site of one of these flourishing manufactures, to which it gave a name which the fabric still bears. The Crusades introduced an Asiatic strain into our English blood, as some of the adventurers brought home Syrian wives and natural children ; while, in much later times, the persecution of the French Huguenots, in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, led to the emigration of between 300,000 and 400,000 persons, most of whom settled in England, were gradually nationalised, instituted some of our most valuable handicrafts, and gave us great scholars like Casaubon; men of letters like Daniel Defoe, Vanbrugh the dramatist, St. Evremond, James Martineau, and Planché; sculptors like Roubilliac; brave soldiers like Lord Ligonier; maritime explorers like Dampier; the greatest of English actors, in the person of David Garrick; Fourdrinier, the inventor of the paper-making machine; Sir A. Layard, the discoverer of Nineveh; Le Keux, the engraver ; and C, J. Latrobe, the first Governor of Victoria.

In carrying out the plan prescribed by the editor of this volume of abstracting from the political and isolating the social facts of our national history, the various writers have brought into prominence much interesting information that is not to be found in ordinary histories. For instance, how little is generally known of the state of agriculture in Britain just before its conquest by the Romans. Yet the country seems to have been rich in farm produce even at that early period. Whatever invaders had come into the island, Cæsar says, they had given up war for tillage. The island was densely populated, Cæsar thought; the buildings were numerous, and the number of cattle great. Among the agricultural exports were cattle and hides, and wheat and barley, of which there was abundance in the island. British hounds were highly prized, being used in war by the Gauls, and in the chase by the Romans." As protection was not yet invented our "rude forefathers" encouraged traffic with their neighbours on the other side of the sea, and obtained in exchange for their exports manufactured articles in iron and bronze, pottery, salt, and cloth. But they seem to have fabricated ceramic wares of their own, of which many examples, in the shape of cinerary urns, drinking cups, and immolation urns, are preserved in the mother country. They also manufactured good serviceable homespun, for "Pliny describes the texture of the cloth from which the Briton's sleeved jacket, trousers, hat, and cloak were made. It was a coarse felt, and so thick as to be a protection against a sword." The gold torques and rings with which the more prosperous members of the community decorated their persons, and the pins and brooches made of polished boar's tusks, appear to have been of native manufacture.

The characteristic institutions of Britain, before its occupation by the Romans, were the free tribe and the bond village. The former was of Aryan origin ; and the tribesman was tall and fair-haired, hospitable, and generous, fond of war and of the chase. He looked down upon the Iberian villager, who either served or paid tribute to him. The tribe was composed of many free heads of families, banded together for purposes of defence, of law, and of tillage. The villagers, whose descendants were afterwards called "villeins," were not allowed to bear arms; they were the bondmen of the superior race, and were not permitted to marry into a free tribal family. We find the tribes surviving the Roman domination, and when Britain regained her independence she was ruled by tribal kings.

What was England like at the end of the fifth century, when it had really become Angle-land? Mr. F. G. Powell tells us that "it was largely cleared and drained and tilled. Here were long water-meadows and fine hill pastures, with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep of divers breeds ; here were herb-gardens, and orchards and vineyards about the houses ; and here were broad cornfields of many acres, producing more grain than the island could consume. The arable was neatly tilled, mostly in the Roman fashion, on the three-field course, and worked with the improved tools and plant of Roman husbandry—iron-coultered ploughs, iron hoes and picks, and iron-shod spades. There were ironworks, mines for tin and lead, marl pits, quarries, potteries, brick and tile kilns, glassworks, and fisheries." As to the old English village, its social composition was almost identical with what it is in the present day. There was the thegn or squire, and the priest appointed by himself; there was the yeoman, who farmed his own land, and the geneat, who was the thegn's tenant. Then there were the peasants, who were unfree ; the labourers, who were serfs; and the village tradesmen, who were free men, and often wandered from place to place. "In early times," writes Mr. Powell, "the women-servants and menials about the yeoman's or the gentleman's house were absolute slaves, and were bought and sold as cattle."

It will be observed that mention is made of vineyards, and although these were probably planted only in the southern portions of the island, yet their evidence, even there, would seem to indicate that the climate must have been much warmer than it is now; for wine was made of the grapes, and wine-presses are depicted in the illuminated manuscripts of the period. Later on, when Domesday Book was compiled, there were as many as 38 vineyards in the mother country. But ale and mead were the popular beverages, as well as a liquor called morat, made from honey and the juice of the mulberry. Ale-houses were common, and convivial habits so general that it was found necessary to forbid priests frequenting the "wine tuns."

At the time of the Norman Conquest the population of England was about 2,000,000 souls; two-thirds of whom were " villeins" and bandsmen. William had won the island at the point of the sword, and with great courage, and he repressed subsequent insurrections with a remorseless hand. The "Wasting of the North," for example, was attended by the ruin and almost the depopulation of the whole of Yorkshire. "Everywhere," observes Mr. A. L. Smith, in the third chapter of the book, "William's methods were the same—to strike terror by ruthless devastation ; to secure the towns by strong Norman garrisons and stone castles; to appoint Norman earls whom he could trust; but to win over the English by pardons and by recognition of native customs and ideas. He was anxious from the first to take up the position of a lawful English king." It is curious to find that what we should now call the crown-lands revenue was paid very largely in kind ; and the scale of commutation shows us what prices were then. An ox was regarded as equivalent to a shilling, a sheep to fourpence ; fodder for twenty horses fourpence; and bread for a hundred men a shilling.

Sanguinary as were the methods by which the Norman Conquest was accomplished, the results were beneficial on the whole to the English people, and to national development. According to the Peterborough Chronicle, the good order established by William was such "that any man who was himself aught might travel from end to end of the land unharmed; and no man durst kill another, however great the injury which he received." Such a state of things offered a striking contrast to the insecurity and anarchy of Anglo-Saxon days, and, although the King made his subjects pay dearly for the internal peace they enjoyed, it encouraged commerce and the arts of life; for "foreign merchants flocked to London and Westminster, to Ipswich, and Boston, and Lincoln. Foreign craftsmen settled everywhere, and all the trades of the mason, the carpenter, the glass-maker, and the workers in metals mast have received an immense stimulus from the castles, cathedrals, and abbeys which began to arise everywhere in the new architecture." This was the Norman, the noblest form of Romanesque; and about the year 1,200 it modulated into the Early English, our first purely English architecture, and the most beautiful of all forms of the so-called Gothic.

These extracts may serve to give some idea of the nature of a work which will take a place of its own amongst our national histories, because it traces the social progress of our race through the various departments of activity which sum up the life of a people.

*Social England. By various writers. Edited, by H. D. Traill. London:Cassell and Co. Melbourne: Melville, Mullen, and Slade.

Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), Saturday 24 March 1894, page 37