58 History of tke English Landed Interest. 



may reasonably believe that the turbulent years succeeding 

 its termination may have obliterated much of a polity which 

 was contrary to ethnic instincts ; but it is impossible to under- 

 stand how the contact for four centuries with the greatest 

 civilising power of the then world could have produced no 

 lasting fruit save in the municipal centres of the national 

 existence. It is more probable that the civilisation of the 

 ancient British at the time of the Teutonic invasion had far 

 outstripped that of the " sea wolves," as a Roman writer of 

 the age had termed the invaders, who had never come into 

 peaceful contact with any but the rudest and most barbarous 

 specimens of mankind. 



It has been pointed out that though the Germans of Cassar's 

 time were very far from being savages, they made but little 

 progress towards a higher civilisation during the two long 

 intervals — the first, from the time of Caesar to that of Tacitus ; 

 the second, from their description by the latter to their ap- 

 pearance on our shores — and three hundred and fifty years 

 made so little impression on their manners as to have pro- 

 voked the inference (wrongly, we believe) that they had con- 

 tinued stationary throughout.^ Yet all this time the ancient 

 British were reaping the benefits of contact with a highly 

 civilised people. It may be inferred that Roman strategy 

 blocked all tendency to combine in the subject tribes of 

 Britain, and to this must be attributed the sole cause of their 

 not becoming a homogeneous and powerful nation. In other 

 respects their refinement and polish must have exceeded any- 

 thing reached in this country up to the Christian period of 

 the later Saxon times. When, then, the Teutonic overlords 

 with their Mark of freemen settled in their midst, it is surely 

 reasonable to believe that the civilisation of the country made 

 a considerable retrograde movement back towards the tribal 

 stage of man's existence. 



' Mommsen, Roman Provinces, ch. on Britain. 



