hen we
are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of
barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of
the borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began
by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay
Britain.

It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman
civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces;
but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great
cities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than
the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were
connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of
Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under
barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who
lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The
whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances,
generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to
go away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help
from ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now the
duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they
naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the
trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller
pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green
when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen
than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are
supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is
the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to
say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.

III

THE AGE OF LEGENDS

We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel,
and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale.
We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in _Cranford_, after
tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick.
Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who
had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.
Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in
British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do
with rational and almost mechan