633 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



to our Anglo-Saxon conquerors. That they conquered a much 

 divided and not very numerous Romanised population of Christians, 

 and overran the greater part, if not the whole, of England proper 

 whilst yet heathens, and within the comparatively short space of 

 time during which they remained such, proves, of course, that the 

 Saxons were superior to the Britons in the arts of war as it was 

 then understood and carried on. But though war in our days is 

 very intimately dependent upon the arts of peace, proficiency in the 

 one set of accomplishments was by no means so correlated with 

 proficiency in the other fourteen hundred years ago. And though 

 my investigations have made me a very firm believer in the ?:eality 

 of the Saxon 'man and steel, the soldier and his sword,' they have 

 not revealed to me any convincing evidence of the importation into 

 this country by these invaders of any such distinctive civilisation 

 as the language often held as to our ^ old Teutonic constitution,' or 



* the landing of Hengist in Thanet having been the birthday of 

 English liberty,' would seem to pre-suppose. Civilisation and 

 culture are not wholly dependent upon material conditions, but 

 I apprehend they cannot exist without giving us some material 

 and tangible evidence of their existence, at all events secundum 

 statum praesentem, of a very different kind from what we find in 

 pre-Augustinian Anglo-Saxon interments in England. Mr. Meri- 

 vale's dictum ^ to the effect that ' it may appear that moral culture 

 is almost altogether independent of material progress,' is too much 

 out of keeping with the ordinarily-accepted views of the way in 

 which the external world works upon human nature, curis acuens 

 mortalia corda, to need discussion at length ; and when Professor 

 Pearson 2 says ^it would be unjust to judge the Teutonic tribes of 

 the fifth century by the low development of the mechanical arts 

 among them,' we expect to have evidence of some other arts and 

 pursuits having somehow or other attained to a compensatory high 

 development amongst these races at that time. Guizot ^, it is well 

 known, has compared the social and political condition of the 

 Germanic races at this period of their history to that of the Red 



^ 'Conversion of the Northern Nations,' p. i86. 



* See, however, his ' History of England,' pp. 44, 51, 103, 112, 130, 264. The high 

 development of the pictorial art to which Professor Westwood's magnificent work, 

 recently (1868) published, speaks, belongs to Christianised, and therefore as little to 



• unalloyed Saxondom ' as do Caedmon, Bede, or Alcuin. 



3 *Hist. Civ. Franc' lect. vii. torn, i; cit. Merivale, ubi supra, note G, p. 185. 



