CEMETERY AT FRILFORD. 631 



and lawlessness of hordes made insolent by conquest than the large 

 towns; and I am inclined to think that where we find Roman 

 remains succeeded by relics of the Anglo-Saxon cremation 

 period, on a locality which now bears an Anglo-Saxon name, 

 emigration or extirpation of a Christian population may have very 

 often entered into the now irrecoverable history of the locality. 



I further suspect that the heathenism of the Anglo-Saxon domi- 

 nation during the hundred and fifty years ^ which elapsed between 

 the time of Hengist and that of Augustine is one and not an un- 

 important factor in the complex aggregation of conditions which 

 has given us the Germanic language which we speak. Whilst 

 and where heathenism reigned supreme, the performance of the 

 Church services would doubtless cease ; and in an age of few books, 

 and those in manuscript, and in a country which, with whatever 

 centres of civilisation and population, was, after all, but thinly 

 peopled, it is easy to understand how the language of the van- 

 quished succumbed in three or four generations to that of the 

 victors, whose relics speak to their great numbers being so ubi- 

 quitously scattered over England. Even in France, where the 

 Merovingians allowed every citizen to declare what law, Frank 

 or Roman, he would live under, and where the priests used the 

 Theodosian code, and so put the Germanic idiom at a disadvantage, 

 it was still employed by the kings and nobles even in the Car- 

 lovingian period 2. On the other hand, during my somewhat 

 considerable practice in the way of exhuming Saxons, and my 

 gradual familiarisation with the two facts of their great aptness at 

 destroying and of their great slowness in elaborating material 

 civilisation, a doubt has little by little grown up in my mind as to 

 the extent of the debt which we are so commonly supposed to owe 



^ Professor Pearson, 'History of England,' i. loi, suggests that the long duration 

 of the struggle may have caused the victory of the Saxon language, by allowing of 

 the perpetual fresh arrivals of German-speaking invaders. 



2 See Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall,' ed. 1838, vi. 118, 351, 376, chap. 38, viii. 156. 

 For an instance of the power obtained and exercised by the Christian ministers, see 

 Fleury, * Eccl. Hist.' viii. 34, 50, of the Council of Macon. Fleury in his small work, 

 •Essays on Ecclesiastical History,' tells us, p. 203, English Transl. 1721, that the 

 Goths, Franks, and other German people dispersed into several parts of the Roman 

 provinces, were so few in comparison with the ancient inhabitants that it was not 

 thought necessary to change the language of the Church on their account. On the 

 other hand, Bede tells us, that in his time God was served in five several languages 

 in Britain, namely, Anglorum, Britonum, Scotorum, Pictorum, et Latinorum. See 

 also Taylor, 'Words and Places,' 1864, p. 151 ; Lingard, 'Hist. A,.-S. Cljurch,' i, 307. 



