used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and
each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any
collective enterprise.

[Sidenote: The English settlement]

Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a
very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest
of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of
bitter warfare. But it was just through the length of the struggle that
of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain
had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the
homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words
mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave
the main facts untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the
invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land
which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his
English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire
and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.

[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]

For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to