nature, which are peculiarly characteristic of the Northern mythology. With this, however, arose the question, so important for the history of the world, whether the great territory already won for the ideas of the universal culture and religion of mankind should be again lost.

Towards the end of the 6th century the epoch began in which, as the German invaders of Gaul had already done, so now those of Spain and Italy, whether Arians or heathens, came over to the Catholic faith of the Provincials. This took place under the mediation of the chief Pontiff, who had raised the city, from which the Empire took its name, to be the metropolis of the Faith. Lombards and Visigoths became as good Catholics as the Franks already were. The relationship of the royal families, which held all Germans in close connexion, and the zeal of Rome, which could not possibly suffer the loss of a province that it had once possessed, now combined to call forth a similar movement among the Anglo-Saxons, yet one which worked itself out in a very different way. Since among the natives a peculiar form of church-life, not unconnected with the Druidic discipline, had arisen, with which Rome would hold no communion, and which rejected all demands of submission, the spiritual enmity of the missionary was united to the national enmity of the conqueror. When a king still heathen, while attacking the Britons, directed his weapons against the monks of Bangor, who (collected on a height) were offering up prayers against him, and massacred them to the number of twelve hundred, the followers of the Roman Mission saw in this a punishment decreed by God for apostasy, and the fulfilment of the prophecies of their apostle.[5] On the other hand British Christian kings also made common cause with the heathen Angles, and wasted with fire and sword the provinces that had been converted by Rome. Had not in the vicissitudes of internal war the native church organisation of the North won influence over the Anglo-Saxons, heathenism would never have been conquered; it would have always found support among the Britons.

When this however had once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the motives for this change those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other motives also which touched the very essence of the matter. Men wished to belong to the great Church Communion which then in still unbroken freedom comprehended the most distant nations.[6] They preferred the bishops whom the kings appointed (with the authorisation of the Roman See), to those over whom the abbot of the great monastery on the island of Iona exercised a kind of supremacy. Here there was no question of any agreement between the German king and the bishops of the land, as under the Merovingians in Gaul; they even avoided restoring the bishops' sees which had flourished in the old Roman times in Britain. The primitive and independent element manifests itself in the decision of the princes and their great men. In Northumberland, Christianity was introduced by a formal resolution of the King and his Witan: a heathen high priest girt himself with the sword, and even with his own hand threw down his idols. The Anglo-Saxon tribes in fact passed over from the popular religion and mythology of the North and of Germany, which would have kept them in barbarism, to the communion of the universal religion, to which belonged the civilisation of the world. Never did a race show itself more susceptible of such an influence: it presents the most remarkable example of how the old German ideas, which had now taken living root in this soil, and the Roman ecclesiastical culture, which was vigorously embraced, met and became intertwined. The first German who made the universal learning, derived from antiquity, his own, was an Anglo-Saxon, the Venerable Beda; the first German dialect in which men wrote history and drew up laws, was likewise the Anglo-Saxon. Despite all their reverence for the threshold of the Apostles they admitted foreign priests no longer than was indispensable for the foundation of the new church: in the gradual progress of the conversion they were no longer needed, we soon find Anglo-Saxon names everywhere in the church: the archbishops and leading bishops are as closely related to the royal families, as the heathen high priests had been before.

It was exactly through the co-operation of both principles, originally so foreign to one another, that the Anglo-Saxon nature took firm and lasting form.

The Kelts had formerly lived under a clan system which, extending over vast districts, yet displayed in each spot characteristic weaknesses which the hostility of every neighbour rendered fatal. Then the Romans had introduced a military administrative constitution, which displaced this tribal system, while it also subjected Britain to the universal Empire, of which it formed only an unimportant province. A characteristic form of life was first built up in Britain by the Anglo-Saxons on the ruins of the Roman rule. The union into which they entered with the civilised world was the freely chosen one of the religion of the human race; they had no other connexion to control them. Their whole energies being concentrated on the island, they gave it for the first time, though continually at war with each other, an independent position.

Their constitution combines the ideas of the army and the tribe: it is the constitution of armies of colonists bringing with them domestic institutions which had been theirs from time immemorial. A society of freemen of the same stock, who divided the soil among themselves in such a manner that the number of the hides corresponded to that of the families (for among no people was there a stronger conception of separate ownership), they composed the armed array of the country, and by their union maintained that peace at home which again secured each man's life and property. At their head stands a royal family, of the highest nobility, which traces its origin to the gods, and has by far the largest possessions; from it, by birth and by election combined, proceeds the King; who then, sceptre in hand, presides in the court of justice, and in the field has the banner carried before him; he is the Lord, to whom men owe fidelity; the Guardian, to whom the public roads and navigable rivers belong, who disposes of the undivided land. Yet he does not stand originally so high above other men that his murder cannot be expiated by a wergeld, of which one share falls to his family—not a larger one than for any other of its members,—and the other to the collective community, since the prince belongs to the former by birth, to the latter by his office. Between the simple freeman and the prince appear the eorls, ealdormen, and thanes, in some instances raised above the mass by noble birth or by larger possessions, natural chiefs of districts and hundreds, in others promoted by service in the King's court and in the field, sometimes specially bound to him by personal allegiance: they are the Witan who have elected him out of his family (in a few instances they depose him); they concur in giving laws, they take part in making peace. Now the bishops take place by their side. They appear with the ealdormen in the judicial meetings of the counties: if the Gerefa neglects his duty, it is for them to step in; yet they have also their own spiritual jurisdiction. It is a spiritual and temporal organisation of small extent, yet