their own township; each tilling the ground with their own
hands and those of their Welsh serfs. The townships were rudely gathered
together into petty chieftainships; and these chieftainships tended
gradually to aggregate into larger kingdoms, which finally merged in the
three great historical divisions of Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex;
divisions that survive to our own time as the North, the Midlands, and
the South. Meanwhile, most of the Roman towns were slowly depopulated
and fell into disrepair, so that a "waste chester" becomes a common
object in Anglo-Saxon history. Towns belong to a higher civilisation,
and had little place in agricultural England. The roads were neglected
for want of commerce; and trade only survived in London and along the
coast of Kent, where the discovery of Frankish coins proves the
existence of intercourse with the Teutonic kingdom of Neustria, which
had grown up on the ruins of northern Gaul. Everywhere in Britain the
Roman civilisation fell into abeyance: in improved agriculture alone did
any notable relic of its existence remain. The century and a half
between the conquest and the arrival of Augustine is a dreary period of
unmixed barbarism and perpetual anarchy.

From time to time the older settled colonies kept sending out fresh
swarms of young emigrants towards the yet unconquered west, much as the
Americans and Canadians have done in our own days. Armed with their long
swords and battle-axes, the new colonists went forth in family bands,
under petty chieftains, to war against the Welsh; and when they had
conquered themselves a district, they settled on it as lords of the
soil, enslaved the survivors of their enemies, and made their leader
into a king. Meanwhile, the older colonies kept up their fighting spirit
by constant wars amongst themselves. Thus we read of contests between
the men of Kent and the West Saxons, or between conflicting nobles in
Wessex itself. Fighting, in fact, was the one business of the English
freeman, and it was but slowly that he settled down into a quiet
agriculturist. The influence of Christianity alone seems to have wrought
the change. Before the conversion of England, all the glimpses which we
get of the English freeman represent him only as a rude and turbulent
warrior, with the very spirit of his kinsmen, the later wickings of the
north.

An enormous amount of the country still remained overgrown with wild
forest. The whole weald of Kent and Sussex