s. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.

It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other
provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by
the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or
the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of
ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank,
but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all
but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to the
point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom
the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other
Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the
Roman civilization. Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank
mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have
familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to be found in the
Imperial provinces of the West. What really made the difference between
the fate of Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
stubborn courage of the British themselves. In all the world-wide
struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or
Visigoth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
popular revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric in
Italy. But in Britain the invader was met by a courage almost equal to
his own. Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fellows
abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
the English had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard fighting.

This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural obstacles of the
gravest kind. Elsewhere in the Roman world t