the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by
tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting
for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the
material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was
impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home
of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked
the site of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the English in the
conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of
their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent
upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the læt
and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of
conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.
It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own
language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village
life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of
kinship, its principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates or
stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common
temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the
days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land
in which we live. Their social and political organization remained
radically unchanged. In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the
wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the
divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough
groundwork of local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred
warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the
local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise