next part of these notes I propose to consider the economic or
civil development of the Thames above London, and to show how the
foundations of its permanent prosperity was laid. That economic
phenomenon has at its roots the action of the Benedictine Order. It
was the great monasteries which bridged the transition between Rome
and the Dark Ages throughout North-Western Europe; it was they that
recovered land wasted by the barbarian invasions, and that developed
heaths and fens which the Empire even in its maturity had never
attempted to exploit.

The effect of the barbarian invasions was different in different
provinces of the Roman Empire, though roughly speaking it increased in
intensity with the distance from Rome. It is probable that the actual
numbers of the barbarian invaders was small even in Britain, as it
certainly was in Northern Gaul, but we must not judge of the effect
produced upon civilisation by this catastrophe, as though it were a
mere question of numbers. So large a proportion of the population was
servile, and so fixed had the imagination of everyone become in the
idea that the social order was eternal; so entirely had the army
become a professional thing, and probably a thing of routine divorced
from the civilian life round it, that at the close of the fourth
century a little shock from without was enough to produce a very
considerable result. In Eastern Britain, small as the number of the
invaders must necessarily have been, religion itself was almost, if
not entirely, destroyed, and the whole fabric of Roman civilisation
appears to have dissolved--with the exception, of course, of such
irremovable things as the agricultural system, the elements of
municipal life, and the simpler arts. Even the language very probably
changed in the eastern part of the island, and passed from what we may
conceive to have been Low Latin in the towns and Celtic dialects in
the country-sides, with possibly Teutonic settlements here and there
along the eastern shore, to a generally confused mass of Teutonic
dialects scattered throughout the eastern and northern half of the
island and enclosing but isolated fragments of Celtic speech.

So far as we can judge the disaster was complete, but it was destined
that Britain should be recivilised.

St Augustine landed, and after the struggle of the seventh century
between those petty chieftains who sympathised with, and those who
opposed, the order of cultivated European life