he from contemplating further conquests, that having once got rid of all trace of the Roman occupation here, he dismissed all further thought of the empire. The comparatively remote situation of Britain furthered his disposition for seclusion, and enabled him to withdraw from all further intercourse with the adjoining mainland. So strong indeed was his native conservativism, and so confirmed was he in his determination to live to himself alone, that he was even prepared to take up arms against any neighbouring tribe of his own nation that ventured to encroach upon his mark or boundary line; and he at times found it difficult to tolerate the proximity of such of his own community as lay outside his own immediate family. With his extraordinary exclusiveness and passion for localization, it is not to be marvelled at that for the early and mediæval Englishman everything centered in the homestead. Unlike the Gael, the Saxon was not gregarious; he lived by himself, or with his family around him, and desired no intruders. Bound to no man nor any man to him, his ideal of liberty was to live in independent seclusion upon his own freehold or farmstead. To the stranger whom chance or circumstances threw across his path, he was hospitable, with quiet dignity; he wished him well, but was secretly relieved when the time came to send him on his way again. Like the trees in his English forests, the Anglo-Saxon stood apart, root-fast, unbending, shut up in the gnarled, forbidding bark of his own nature, whose stern exterior few could penetrate, but whose harshness was forgiven it by those who knew how it encircled, not hollowness, but a heart of oak.

For despite his reserve the Saxon was not the cold, impenetrable personality he appeared, and his very fierceness in

1 Tacitus noted this feature, and his remark is quoted by Green (p. 5, 1893 edit.). Cf. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, i., p. 231 : “His own home and parish were more to him than the House of Cerdic, or the safety of the nation;" and ibid., par. 81, "The individual Englishman."

Cf. Stubbs, ibid., i., 20. Vide also Kemble, Saxons in England, i., 131–134. Cf. also Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii., p. 324, note 75, quoting Supus, who refers to it as a great public calamity that, owing to the Danish invasions, "Freemen may not govern themselves. . . nor possess their own, as they like."

war testified to the play of passionate powers within him. Ruthless warrior as he was, his immediate kinsfolk knew the depth and warmth of his affections, his passionate devotion to the wife of his choice, his forbearing tenderness towards his children. There was fire under that seemingly hard outer crust: poetic imagination and religious enthusiasm were there, glowing none the less fiercely because so carefully repressed; but fanned by a chance wind from some unexpected quarter, his soul's sullen embers would leap into flame, glorifying everything upon which their light was cast. Like the bards of old, he called things by new names. Ocean was to him "the whale's path;" or gazing on the high-curved prow of his boat, he called it "the foam-necked."1 Filled to overflowing with the poetic sense of all things, the impulse drove him to seize his harp, and he burst wonderfully into song.2

The gradual conversion of the Saxon tribes to Christianity, which took place in the seventh and eighth centuries, gave an exceptional opportunity to the Saxon muse; so that, by the close of the seventh century, while the politics of the country were merely tribal, Saxon learning and literature were notably in advance of any in Europe. But I am not here concerned with early English literature, except in quoting it both as the first conscious expression of that dreamy, hero-worshipping Saxon nature, which was centuries later to bequeath us a Chaucer, a Shakespeare, and more important still, as evidence how from the first the main trend of the Anglo-Saxon character was towards the expression and practice of ideas. From the first the Englishman was occupied with the moral rather than with the material aspect of things; he was occupied, like the Greeks, in the search for Truth, Beauty, Justice, and Self-control.

Side by side with his literary output, the next expression of his enthusiastic individuality was given in early English industrial art. The early Englishman was not merely a poct 1 Cf. Kemble's Beowulf (1847), pp. 10–13.

Cf. J. R. Green, History of the English People (1893), i., pp. 53, 54.

Cf. Stubbs, i., 39, "a great family of tribes ;" and again, ibid., p. 231, par. 81. Cf. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, i., 234, 235; and Green's History (1893), pp. 69-75.

and dreamer, but also a fine and original artist. It had followed from their wholesale rejection of imperial ideas, that our forefathers had to seek and find out everything for themselves, and to begin at the very beginning of Art and Industry.1 The Goths and Franks had taken up Roman civilization just where they found it. Not so the Saxon. He delighted above all things in going his own way, and in finding everything out for himself. He would not be helped. He was prepared to give laws to all the world rather than to receive any. It never occurred to him. that he was ignorant, or that the outsider could teach him anything. He preferred his own unique, if laborious methods, to anything that came from over seas. Disdaining the Frank's short cuts to civilization, he would have hewn down forest upon forest of difficulties rather than have owed his direction to a stranger.

But some of his finest arts he brought with him. From earliest times the Saxons were a nation of splendid smiths: 2 Thor's craft was held in magnificent honour amongst them. At home, too, their women wove a rude woollen cloth for the family use, while up to the period of the Danish invasions English embroidery and missal painting, in point of wealth and ingenuity of device, were of unsurpassed beauty and excellence. It was during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries that English decorative art received the impulse of that “AngloSaxon spirit of design" to which Mr. J. O. Westwood refers, the peculiarly distinctive character which marked it out from all the continental work of the period.

The economic helplessness of the Saxons is well illustrated in Bede's account of the South Saxons, whom Bishop Wilfred found throwing themselves in parties from the rocks into the sea for want of a better remedy against the famine. He partly achieved their conversion by teaching them the art of fishing, of which they appear to have been utterly ignorant.

2 Cf. Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, edit. Kemble, 1847, "Anglo-Saxons. . . mighty war-smiths;" cf. also Kemble's Saxons in England, ii., p. 306, refers to "the heroical weapon-smith;" cf. also the long account of the smith's importance among the Saxons in Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. iii., p. 110.

3 Cf. Archæologia, x., 275: "Of the distinctive character of various styles of ornamentation employed by the early English, Anglo-Saxon, and Irish artists," Also ibid., vol. vii., p. 17.

But though his artistic and poetic impulse prompted the early Englishman to fashion much that was valuable as art, he worked for no distant market, but simply to satisfy his own ideals, or to adorn the shrines of the church in his own town or hamlet. Artistically gifted as he was, he possessed the true artist's proverbial lack of business qualities; he did not possess the desire to trade, and he had no commercial spirit.1 Intricate business calculations had neither part nor lot in his mind, and his taciturn reserve, his mistrust of strangers and of everything to which he was unaccustomed, made him unfitted for the pursuit of those glib, persuasive arts which were necessarily exercised in the medieval chapman's calling. His ignorance and inexperience disposed him to be, on the one hand, too suspicious, and on the other, too credulous for a successful bargainer, whilst his native integrity and downrightness made him utterly disdainful of all trade tricks.

As times were then, the Anglo-Saxon must have made but a sorry merchant, and even supposing him to have been inclined for commerce, the internal divisions of the country were extremely unfavourable to its development. Tribe warred against tribe, and community was hostile to community, so that if the humble Saxon pedlar had wished to shoulder his pack and fare afield, he would not have been able. Inclination and necessity alike therefore united in discouraging him from any attempts at an "upland trade," and, as I have endeavoured to show, he surlily withdrew from all international communications, commercial or otherwise. How little he ventured with his wares abroad is attested by the inducement of "thegnhood," which the king held out to any trader who made three voyages at his own cost.4

1 Cf. Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, i., 122, "averse to trade;" and ibid., p. 104, where he quotes Strabo's verdict, "They cared little for money or merchandise;" cf. also Stubbs, i., 18 (Const. Hist.).

2 Turner's Anglo-Saxons, chap. ix., pp. 104-106.

3 Ibid., p. 119, "Travelling. for purposes of traffic was very rare,” etc.

...

4 Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons, quotes Alfred's translation of Ohther's voyages to the North as proof that about this time "the habit of visiting distant parts for purposes of traffic had already begun." But this can hardly be taken as evidence of Anglo-Saxon exploits, as Ohther was clearly a Northman, and moreover

Thus it was this native ineptitude for commerce which, even more than racial or geographical isolation, caused England to lag so far in the rear of European industry, and which, taken in connexion with that two-fold isolation, sufficiently explains the clumsiness of English mercantile methods at a time when most of our continental neighbours were skilled merchants and financiers.

Had the Anglo-Saxon been left as severely alone as he desired to be, it would be curious to speculate what commercial standing he would unassistedly have attained, or if indeed he would have developed the commercial instinct at all. But he was far from being suffered to enjoy undisturbedly the solitude he loved in the island home he had so doggedly fought for, and which, with a careless confidence, born of sheer ignorance of external matters, and unwarranted by the troubled state of Europe at that time, he took ridiculously disproportionate

means to secure.

The Saxon's conquest of Britain, and his wanton destruction of the imperial civilization here, had set him outside the pale of European conventions: henceforth he was the enemy of all who had succeeded to the purple, or hoped to succeed thereto. Europe had not forgotten Britain, if the English were doing their best to forget Europe, and the sight of an island so admirably situated for trade purposes, thrown away on a people who had no idea how to develope its resources, afforded for several centuries to come an irresistible temptation to the greed both of political and mercantile adventurers. The political, social, and industrial history of England, from the close of the ninth to the opening of the fifteenth century, is simply the recital of the efforts made by Europe to obtain a footing in this island, and to force the acceptance of her civilization upon us.

the wonder his exploits excited even in King Alfred's mind clearly proves that such voyages were regarded as something quite out of the common. What is more probable is that the king translated them with a view to exciting a spirit of emulation among his own thegns and merchants, a spirit in which they were somewhat lacking, as is evident from the "fearfulness" of the Anglo-Saxon fisherman, who confined his fishing to fresh water, because it required big ships for seafishing (Turner, iii., p. 24).