Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1096 page)

shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock’s neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
You’ll go where laurel crowns are won, but

will you e’er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?

Let me work here for Britain’s sake — at any

task you will —
A marsh to drain, a road to make, or native

troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or

granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old mess-mates sleep.

Legate, I come to you in tears — my cohort

ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?

Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — - the

only life I know —
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!

And peace was imposed all over Southern
Britain; and the legions came to be stationed only on the frontier, and hardly ever moved.
No doubt at first these legions were recruited from all the regions over which Rome ruled,
and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from
Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been recruited in Britain itself and from
Britons. Celtic mothers bore British sons to
Roman fathers, and crooned Celtic songs over the cradles of babies who would one day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue,
which the Romans had brought with them,
was enriched with many Celtic words.

It was, however, a misfortune for Britain that Rome never conquered the whole island.
The great warrior Agricola did, between a.d.
79 and 85, penetrate far into Scotland; but he could leave no traces of civilization behind him,
and Ireland he never touched at all. So
Ireland never went to school, and has been a spoilt child ever since. And there was always a “Scottish frontier” to be guarded, and along this frontier the Emperor Hadrian, early inthe second century, began the famous Roman
Wall. His successors improved on it until it became a mighty rampart of stone, eighty miles long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers.

To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched, certainly unsubdued, the wilder
Celts whom the Romans called “Picts” or painted men; the screen of the wall seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these.
But prosperity and riches are often bad for men; they lead to the neglect of defence. I
fear that Roman Britain went to sleep behind her walls, recruiting fell off, the strength of the legions became largely a “paper strength.”

And not only in Britain. The greatest empire that the world has ever seen was slowly dying at the heart, dying of too much power,
too much prosperity, too much luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day! There were pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, landthieves and sea-thieves. They began to break through the frontiers. One fine day the terrible news came to York, the capital of Roman
Britain, that the Picts were over the wall.
Where was the commander-in-chief? Oh! he was at Bath taking the waters to cure his indigestion. Where was the prefect (the highest

representative of the Emperor)? Oh! he lived at Lyons in Southern France; for he governed
France as well as Britain. Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down to Italy to make himself Emperor! If so, he would be for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain instead of sending more to defend it. “A few barbarians more or less over the wall” mattered very little to a man who lived, by neglecting his duties, in Southern
France; “they could easily be driven back next year.”

But it soon came to be less easy, and the barbarians soon came to be more than a few.
An officer, called the “Count of the Saxon
Shore,” was created to watch against the pirates.
The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for themselves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome, Britain, and civilization were equally coming to an end, and it would be long before they revived. Half a century had completed the Roman conquest of the island; two and a half centuries of happy peace had followed; in another half century it was all over. Long before the last Roman legions were withdrawn, in 407, pirates had been breaking down all the walls and defences of Britain.

Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic Scots from
Ireland; worse than all,
down the North-east wind
came terrible “Englishmen,” “Saxons,”
from the shores of North Germany and Denmark. Rome had forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves with rabbits and lambs;
now they were going to feast once more upon the corpses of men.

CHAPTER II

SAXON ENGLAND

The Pirates in England

When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall,
And the sceptre passed from her hand,
The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall
To harry the British land.

The little dark men of the mountain and waste,

So quick to laughter and tears,
They came panting with hate and haste
For the loot of five hundred years.

They killed the trader, they sacked the shops,

They ruined temple and town —
They swept like wolves through the standing crops

Crying that Rome was down.

They wiped out all that they could find
Of beauty and strength and worth,
But they could not wipe out the Viking’s Wind,
That brings the ships from the North.

They could not wipe out the North-east gales5

Nor what those gales set free —
The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails,
Leaping from sea to sea.

They had forgotten the shield-hung hull

Seen nearer and more plain,
Dipping into the troughs like a gull,
And gull-like rising again —

The painted eyes that glare and frown,

In the high snake-headed stem,
Searching the beach while her sail comes down,
They had forgotten them!

There was no Count of the Saxon Shore

To meet her hand to hand,
As she took the beach with a surge and a roar,
And the pirates rushed inland.

Early in the fourth century the Roman
Empire had become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire.
One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was

afterward dedicated. It is probable, however,
that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire,
Britain was divided in bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down.

Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent — you might almost say conscientious
 — heathens. They feared and hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civilization; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, were also being overrun by barbarians, but none of these was as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore in Italy, France,
and Spain the “re-making” of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in
Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westward to the Severn.
An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked.
“Some therefore of the miserable remnant
(of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great numbers, others constrained by famine came and yielded themselves to be slaves forever to their foes, running the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the greatest favour that could be offeredthem: some others passed beyond the seas with loud lamentations.”

The Saxons brought their wives and children with them, though it is difficult to believe that they were so stupid as to kill
all
the Britons instead of enslaving them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not done this, surely there would have been some traces left of Latin or Celtic speech, law, and religion. But there were none. When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely
English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely
English language; while, as for religion, the people have to be converted all over again by a special mission from the Pope at Rome.

Probably the British made a very desperate defence, and were only slowly beaten westward into Wales, Lancashire, Devon, and
Cornwall. Something like two centuries passed before the English were thorough masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that while Roman temples, churches, roads, and cities were crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins. Studying the history of those days is like looking at a battlefield in a fog. As the fog clears we get some notion of our dear barbarian forefathers.

The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with the vices and cruelties of an overgrown boy;
a drunkard and a gambler, and very stupid.
But he was a truth-teller, a brave, patient,
and cool-headed fellow. A Roman historian describes him as “a free-necked man married to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses kick.” He honoured his women and he loved his home; and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more than into any of those who lived before or came after him. He never knew when he was beaten,
and so he took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to Britain, so completely that within two centuries his coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe; and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were always coming.
England should always beware of the northeast wind. It blows her no good.

Tilling the fields was the Saxon’s real job;
he was a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature,
and like a true plough- and cow-boy he was always grumbling. He hated being governed;
he always stood up for his “rights,” and oftentalked a lot of nonsense about them. He obeyed his kings when he pleased, which was not often, and these kings had very little power over him. But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it with his clumsy plough.
In the sweat of his brow he ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much of the beer)
which he raised on it.
a saxon Every English village could keep itself to village, ‘j-ggj^ since it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except salt, iron, and millstones,
which could only be found in certain favoured places. In most villages there was a sort of squire called a “thegn,” who paid something,
either a rent or a service of some kind, to a king or to a bigger thegn, and owned much more land than the ordinary freemen. Probably also he owned a few slaves, whether of
English or British birth. There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the seventh century there was also in most villages a priest. Of the freemen, every head of a family owned certain strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen. There was also a great common