Thanks all those xanga members who have sent E-mails and those who have made comments about the way in which my weblogs have been interfered with since September 2002.

     And in answer to Twiggly 713:   Well, Eddie did exaggerate just a little bit.  I won't be 99 years old until the 30th of July, this year, 2003.

      Thanks Eddie for all your efforts on my behalf.  It is appreciated as you are well aware.

     All the very best wishes to all xanga members.  Hope to be writing again when the problem is sorted out.

                                                                   Percy

                         THE EARLY HISTORY OF BRITAIN        (14)

      The bones of these early, nameless, chies are dug up today in early Anglo-Saxon graveyards, lying between the rusted shield-boss and spear-head that expelled Rome from Britain and drove the Celts into the West and North of the country.  Little is really known of the true-life storyof these early invaders.  Why they decided to cross the sea, where they landed, and in what manner they fought.  Unfortunately there are no authentic records or chronicles of the Saxon conquest.  What is known is that the Britons in their refuge among the Welsh mountains relapsed into Celtic barbarism, and we know that the priest Gildas wrote for them a Book pf Lasmentations in Latin, but it answers few of the purposes of history.

      Sorry cannot continue with this story, having trouble with the xanga site set up which keeps displaying fault messages indicating that the page cannot be reached through internal error.

                        Will try again tomorroe           

                                                                 Percy.

It would appear that the message below the weblog button is changing each time I submit a paragraph, ad when that happens I lose all that I have written up to that point.

       It's a darned nuisance.  P

                         THE EARLY HISTORY OF BRITAIN      (13)

      In Scotland the Celtic element is racially stronger, but in that country the Nordic language and character have prevailed.  If there is any objection to the use of ther word 'Nordic', then the objection must be made to all terms invented afterwatds for historical purposes.  But to give just conception to British history, a single word must sometimes be employed to cover German, the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian races that have gone into the build-up of the race.  These races had originally come from the shores of the Baltic though the ancestors of the Franks, Goths and Vandals had wandered off West and South long before, in the course of the last 1,000 years.

      All the kinsmen had much in common:  allied languages, the religion of Thor and Woden after which most of the English and some of the German days of the week are called. There was much to connect German, Anflo-Saxon and Scandinavian;  their agricultural methods, and their methods of making war.  But there is a danger in the practice, once prevalent among some early historians, of applying to our Anglo-Saxon ancestors living in the North Sea and Baltic areas in the 5th century, descriptions written by Caesar and Tacitus of the German tribes on the River Rhine, four or five hundred years before.

      The Anglo-Saxons settled the greater part of Britain from the Firth of Forth to the borders of Cornwall, and the Jutes settled Kent and the Isle of Wight.  Some scholars think the Anglo-Saxons as being substantially one people, while others adhere to the distinction that was evident at the time of their occupation of Britain.  At the time of their migration to Britain, the Angles and Saxons were occupying parts of the modern Denmark and Germany on both sides of the River Elbe.  The difference between them in language and customs was slight.  The Jutes were a smaller tribe, kindred, but distinct.  Tjey came to Britain either directly from their old home in Jutland, in Northern Denmark, or, as some think, from their more recent settlement in Frisia and on the Lower River Rhine.

      Many of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain were farmers seeking richer ploughlands than the overworked sandy dunes, heaths, marshes and forests of the North European shore.  But many of them were also deep sea fishermen, seal-hunters and whalers, trained to hardihood in conflict with the storms, the 'sea-monsters' and pirates then common in the North Sea.  They were themselves pirates and plunderers when on the war-path by sea or land.  They were said to have a high sense of honour and much kindly good-nature in dealings with their own folk at home, but were also fierce , courageous and loyal. 

      They were accustomed to follow their chosen chiefs with great fidelity on marauding expeditions along the coasts between Norway and Frisia but they were not nomads in the true sense, for wherever they settled they practised agriculture.  The Anglo-Saxon form of government was autocratic Kinship, descended from the gods, although such autocracy was limited by the customs of the tribe, by the temper of the tribesmen, and by the personal qualities of the King himself.  Pre-eminent among the many lesser Kings who bore rule among our ancestors before their migration to Britain, was one Offa, King of the 'Angles', regarded as a historical character, who waged war on the shores of the River Eider, now in Schleswig, but then the Southern boundary of the territories of the Angles, against the Teutonic tribes of the South.

      The Anglo-Saxons at the time of their coming to Britain had both Kingship and aristocracy.  The military and naval organisation of a group of migratory Anglo-Saxons bound for the mouth of the Rivers Ouse, Trent or Thames, was based not so much on kinship, as on the discipline of the ship's crew, and on the personal attachment of the professional warriors to the chief who had organised the expedition.  The solid farmers of the tribe would follow afterwards, with the women and children, in case the raid leads to a successful land settlement.  But the spear-head of the invasion was the chief and his followers.

      The invader chief himself, wears the boar-shaped helmet and shirt of ring-mail, and wields the jewel-hilted sword of his ancestors, the work of one Wayland Smith.  He presented the sword to the captain of each galley, and had given to every man in his train a round wooden shield and a long spear with ashwood shaft and an iron head.  Hengist, the Jute, the traditional conquerors of Kent, whoever he may have been, stands out as the type of these great, forgotten makers of history, the men who in pursuit of their own hearty lusts for gain and adventure, unwittingly founded "England" and all that has since come to England as we know it.

                       THE EARLY HISTORY OF BRITAIN      (12)

      The Christian Church continues with its persecuting spirit for a further 1,500 years, although  the persecution of the population of Britain, was probably on a small scale, for the Church there was also on a small scale, but the story of St. Albans' martyrdom remains as a symbol of the fact.  Where the Roman Empire  detected no challenge  to its authority, it embraced with open arms all local variations of polytheism, and attempted to identify the Celtic tribal deities and local nature-spirits with gods of its own Graeco-Roman Pantheon  -  itself an amalgamation made on similar lines.

      Zeus-Jupiter was not a jealous god, and polytheism in all its various forms may almost be regarded as a single religion, whereas Judaism, Christianity and Mohamed-anism are naturally exclusive.  Although the Druidical priesthood had been suppressed as politically dangerous, the natives of Britain continued freely to worship their old deities, together with those of the Romans, while the ployglot army on the Wall honoured all gods of the far-flung Empire, but most of all the Roman Gods, and strange Oriental cults like Mithraism.   These latter had become important in the life of  the Western Mediterranean, and undoubtedly prepared the way for the general acceptance of another mystic religion from the East. 

      Constantine made Christianity the official creed of the Roman Empire a hundred years before the withdrawal of the legions from Britain, but even so, the new cult does not seem to have spread very rapidly in the most distant provinces of the country, if we are to judge from the very few Christian remains  which have been unearthed by archaeologists in the Romano-British sites.  There was, however, enough to survive among the Welsh when every other Roman institution had disappeared, bevcause after the departure of the Roman Generals and officials, the Christiam Missionaries, alone among the emissaries of civilisation did not desert the Britons in their day of trouble. 

      The settlement of the Nordic people in this island is the governing event in British history.  The various interruptions of the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, of Danes and Norsemen, had its prelude in the first plundering raids of the Saxon pitates on the coast of  Roman Britain well before 300 AD, and it ends about 1200 AD, when King Canute completed the Scandinavian conquest of Britain by reconciliation on equal terms of the kindred races of Saxons and Danes. Between these dates the racial character of the ihabitants of the country was fundamentally altered.  The racial basis can be said  to have been fixed by the time of Canute.  These Nordic invasions are considered to be more important than the Roman interlude, even more important than the Norman Conquest itself, and the failure of the Romans to Latinise the Celtic civilisation, was becausr there were too few Romans to intermingle with, or subdue entirely the tribal villages.

      Later, the Norman-French attempt to Gallicise Britain by their aristocracy and clergy, also met with failure, although it must be said that the efforts that they made had great and permanent consequences.  Nonetheless, their attempt was gradually abandoned  in the face of the facts of race.  The earlier Nordic Conquest of Britain had larger permanent results than any other conquest because, it was secured on a general displacement of the Celtic by Nordic peoples in the richest agricultural districts in the island.  The dsitinctive character of the modern English, is Nordic tempered with Wrelsh  -  not Welsh tempered with Nordic.

                                     THE EARLY HISTORY OF BRITAIN   (11)

      Devon and Cornwell were an isolated pocket of Celtic tribalism.  It was in the fruitful plains of the South-East of England that the Latinised Britons were concentrated, in a peaceful and civilised land, where the sight of a cohort of soldiers on the march was a rarity, but where Roman cities were plentiful and Roman civilisation powerful in its attraction.  From each of the cities that the Romans had built in the island, they strove to govern and transform the surrounding countryside.  And so in the South of Britain the first thing the Romans did was to build still more cities.

      Besides Londonand the greater municipalities, there were many lesser towns, like Silchester, which the Romans planned out in their regular fashion, and even the common workmen talked Latin and were educated enough to read and write it, and was discovered from the words scribbled for their amusement on tiles and potsherds as they worked, which modern archaeologists have dug up and interpreted.  It was a high civilisation, much more elaborate than anything seen again for many centuries  in England.  But it was not a native product, sprung from the soil, it was a life of the great cosmopolitan empire overseas, of which the more progressive  among the islands's tribes were content for a while to become part.

      The areas of agriculture and the area of land was extended by reclaiming from the forest and fen districts, notably in what is now Cambridgeshire, but even there the work was only begun, and the highlands from Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire  were still left  in the main to the forest.  The valleys of the Rivers Thames and Trent, were still water-logged, and contained no connected line of important towns and villages.  The Romans did something for deforesting and draining, but mostly this was not done until the time of the Saxons and the Danes. Nevertheless in those districts which were already reclaimed for the plough, Roman Britain raised enough grain for themselves and to export some to the Continent.   

      The government of the occupied country was carried out from five centres, Verulamium, Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester and York.  Mercantile London, althpough larger in size than any of these centres, had less official status. The rest of civilised Britain was divided up into cantons, answering to Celtic tribal areas and bearing tribal names.  The cantonal administration was as far as possible, centered on some Roman town not of municipal rank.  It was characteristic of the Romans that instead of trying to stamp out native tribalism they used it as a means of government, while at the same time they undermined the spirit of it by contact with their own more attractive civilisation.  Every imducement was made to the local Celtic chief to become Roman in dress, lamnguage and heart, and on these conditions he could remain a Celtic chief in relation to his tribesmen exercising his authority over them as a togaed Roman official.

      Tye Roman Empire put no shackles on philosophic speculation or on the variety of religions practised by the tribes, and struck only those organisations like Druidism and the Christian Church which seemed to challenge the Roman authority as a government.  When it persecuted, it was not from a religious standpoint, but from political motives. The persecution of the Christians was not for that reason any less odious, or less disastrous in its results, for the intermittent attacks made on the early Christian Church by the Roman Empire must have greatly helped to engender the persecuting spirit which the Christian Church itself showed the moment that it got the upper hand.