ther provincials of Rome so the forces of
their assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy than attack by
land, and the numbers who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or
Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric or Chlodewig
across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing in small parties, and but gradually
reinforced by after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and
fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of any joint action among the
assailants told in the same way. Though all spoke the same language and
used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and
each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any
collective enterprise.

[Sidenote: The English settlement]

Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a
very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest
of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of
bitter warfare. But it was just through the length of the struggle that
of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain
had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the
homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words
mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave
the main facts untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the
invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land
which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his
English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire
and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.

[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]

For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to
the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon
the wreck of Rome. In other