was occupied in the contests of ambitious par- CHAP. tisans.

"THE Country," says Gildas, "though weak against its foreign enemies was brave and unconquerable in civil warfare. Kings were appointed, but not by God; they who were more cruel than the rest, attained to the high dignity."

WITH as little right or expediency as they derived their power they lost it. "They were killed, not from any examination of justice, and men more ferocious still were elected in their place. If any happened to be more virtuous or mild than the rest, every degree of hatred and enmity was heaped upon them." The clergy partook of the contentions of the day.

He renews this picture in his address to the British kings who had survived the Saxon invasion, and although his expressions are not elucidated by any historical detail, yet they are supported by the expression of St. Jerome, "Britain, a province fertile in tyrants," and by the assertion of Procopius, that it remained a long time under its tyrants.20

HERE that agreement between Gildas and other writers occurs, which entitles him to belief; and if his other loose declamations about the devastations of the barbarians in Britain, and the application of the natives to Ætius for succour, have any foundation, they must be referred to the period of those civil wars which succeeded the Roman departure. We can conceive, that when the strength of the country was not directed to its protection, but was

19 Gildas, s. 19.

20 Procop. Hist. Vandal, lib. i. sed mansit ab eo tempore sub τυρρανοις. 2 Jerom ad Ctes. Britannia provincia fertilis tyrannorum. 3 Gibb. 277. 1 Masc. 516.

VOL. I.

VIII.

II.

BOOK wasted in mutual conflicts, the hostilities of the Picts and Scots may have met with much success. Not opposed by the force of the whole island, but by the local power of the particular civitas or district invaded, the enemies may in many parts, especially of the northern districts, have defeated the opposition, and desolated the land of the northern borders and the adjacent coasts. With equal success, from the same cause, the western shores may have been plundered by the Scots, and the southern by the Saxons. Some of the maritime states, abandoned by their more powerful countrymen, may have sought the aid of Ætius, as they afterwards accepted that of the Saxons; but either the account of Gildas is rhetorical exaggeration, or is applicable only to particular districts, and not to the whole island.

Many kings in Britain.

THESE Contests seem at last to have produced a great cluster of regal chiefs within the island. We hear of kings of Devonshire, Cornwall, Kent, and Glastonbury; several kings of Cumbria, the kings of Deira and Bernicia, several contemporary kings of Wales, and others in the north and west of Eng land, about the time of the Saxons.21 We find Malgocune styled by Gildas, the dethroner of many tyrants; and Nennius mentions the Saxons to have fought, and Arthur to have marched, with the kings of the Britons.22 But this succession of tyrants is only known to us by casual intimation, and by the denunciations of Gildas. They appear in their rest of obscurity like the distant wood at the last refractions of the departed sun: we behold only

21 See Gildas, Ep. p. 10. Nennius, p. 105-107.117. Taliesin, passim. Caradoc Llanc. ap. Usher, 469. Llyward hen; Aneurin. 22 Gildas, 12. Nennius, 114.

a dark mass of gloom, in which we can trace no shapes, and distinguish no individuals.

In this period of the independence and civil warfare of Britain, one tyrant is said to have predomi nated over the rest, or at least in the southern part of the island, whom Gildas calls Gurthrigernus, and whom the Welsh triads and poets name Gwrtheyrn.23

BUT Britain was not now in the state in which the Romans had found it. Its towns were no longer barricadoed forests, nor its houses wood cabins covered with straw", nor its inhabitants savages, naked with painted bodies, or clothed with skins. 27 It had been for above three centuries the seat of Roman civilisation and luxury. Roman emperors had been born, and others had reigned in it.29 The natives had been ambitious to obtain, and hence had not only built houses, temples, courts, and market places in their towns, but had adorned them with porticoes, galleries, baths, and

23 It has been already remarked, p. 76, that the Vortigern of Jeffry seems to be a mixture of Gerontius and Gwrtheyrn. Nennius has added some idle fables to his name; yet gives him a genealogy. Mac Guortheneu, McGuitaul, McGuitolin, Mc ap Glou, p. 112. The Saxon Ethelwerd, p. 833. calls him Wrtheyrn, which corresponds with the name in the Welsh remains.

24 Cæsar, lib. v. c. 14. Tac. Vit. Agr. Strabo, lib. iv. 25 Diod. Sic. lib. v. c. 8.

26 Cæsar, lib. v. Mela, lib. iii. c. 6. Pliny, Hist. lib. xxii. c. 1. 27 Cæsar, lib. v. c. 14.

28 As Constantine the Great; for such I consider to be the fair meaning of the orator's words addressed to him, speaking of Britannias, or the British Isles, "Tu etiam nobiles, ILLIC ORIENDO, fecisti.” Mr. Gibbon thinks this may refer to his accession; but the other opinion is the most natural construction; and so the foreign editor thought when he added the marginal note, "Nam in Britannia Constantinus natus fuit."

29 Carausius, Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine, and others.

CHAP.

VIIL

II.

BOOK saloons, and with mosaic pavements, and emulated every Roman improvement. They had distinguished themselves as legal advocates and orators31, and for their study of the Roman poets.32 Their cities had been made images of Rome itself, and the natives had become Romans.33 The description of Caerleon in Wales is applicable to many others in Britain. The ruins of Verulam, near St. Alban's, exhibited analogous signs of splendour and luxury; and the numerous remains of habitations or towns built in the Roman fashion, which casual excavations are even yet every year, and sometimes every month, disclosing to our view, show that

20 Tacit. Vit. Ag. c. 21.

31 Hence Juvenal's "Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos," Sat. 15. Gaul being their place of study.

32 So Martial intimates, "Dicitur et nostros cantare Britannia versus." Ep.

33 Hence Gildas says, " Ita, ut non Britannia, sed Romania insula, censeretur," c. v. p. 3. He adds, that all their coins were stamped with the image of the emperor. Ibid.

34 Giraldus has left this account of its remains in the twelfth century. "It was elegantly built by the Romans with brick walls. Many vestiges of its ancient splendour still remain, and stately palaces, which formerly, with the gilt tiles, displayed the Roman grandeur. It was first built by the Roman nobility, and adorned with sumptuous edifices, with a lofty tower, curious hot baths, temples now in ruins, and theatres encompassed with stately walls, in part yet standing. The walls are three miles in circumference, and within these, as well as without, subterraneous buildings are frequently met with; as aqueducts, vaults, hypocausts, stoves," &c. Giral. Camb. Itin. Camb. p. 836.

35 One abbot of St. Alban's, before the conquest, found great subterraneous passages of the ancient city, Verulam, solidly arched and passing under the river, and tiles and stones, which he set apart for the building of a church. Mat. Par. Vit. Ab. p. 40. The next abbot exploring farther, met with the foundation of a great palace, and remains of many buildings, with some manuscripts. He discovered several stone floors, with tiles and columns fit for the intended church; and pitchers and vessels made of earth, and neatly shaped as with a wheel; and also vessels of glass, containing the ashes of the dead. He also met with several dilapidated temples, subverted altars, idols, and various coins. Mat. Par. ibid. p. 41.

36

VIII.

Britain, at the time of the Saxon invasion, had CHAP. become a wealthy, civilised, and luxurious country. These epithets, however, whenever used, are but comparative phrases, and their precise meaning varies in every age, from the dawn of Egyptian civility to our own bright day. Britain did not

in the fifth century possess our present affluence and civilisation, but those of a Roman province at that epoch. It had not our mind, or knowledge, or improvements, but it shared in all that Rome then possessed or valued. Gildas has been emphatically querulous in painting the desolations which it had endured before his time— the sixth century - from the Picts, the Irish, and the Saxons, and from its own civil fury; and yet, after all these evils had occurred, he describes it as containing twenty-eight cities, and some well-fortified castles, and speaks of the country with metaphors that seem intended to express both cultivation and abundance. Bede, who lived two centuries after Gildas, does not subtract from his description; but on the contrary adds "nobilissimis" to his cities, and "innumera" to his castles 38, which Nennius above a century later repeats.

37

39

36 It is mentioned by the orator Eumenius, that when the father of Constantine the Great rebuilt Autun, he was chiefly furnished with workmen from Britain, "which abounded with the best builders." Eum. Pan. 8.

37 Gildas, c. 1. The fecundity of the harvests of Britain, and the innumerable multitudes of its cattle and sheep, had been extolled by the Roman encomiast of Constantine. Paneg. Const. And we read in Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xviii. c. 2., and Zosimus, lib. iii., of corn being carried to Germany from Britain, by the Roman armies, as if from their granary. Permission had been granted by Probus to plant vines and make wine in Britain. Scrip. Aug. p. 942.; and see Henry's History, vol. ii. p. 106-112. 39 Nenn. 3 Gale. p. 98.

28 Hist. Eccl. c. 1. p. 41.