On Something (Dodo Press) (12 page)

It happened that the King of that island, whose name was Atwald, had two
heirs, youths, whom it was pitifully hoped this conqueror would spare, for
they fled up the Water to Stoneham; but a monk who served God by the ford
of reeds which is near Hampton at the head of the Water, hearing that King
Caedwalla (who was recovering of wounds he had had in the war with the men
of Wight) had heard of the youths' hiding-place and had determined to kill
them, sought the King and begged that at least they might be instructed
in the Faith before they died, saying to him: "King, though you are not
of the Faith, that is no reason that you should deprive others of such
a gift. Let me therefore see that these young men are instructed and
baptized, after which you may exercise your cruel will." And Caedwalla
assented. These lads, therefore, were taken to a holy place up on Itchen,
where they were instructed in the truths and the mysteries of religion.
And while this so went forward Caedwalla would ask from time to time
whether they were yet Christians.

At last they had received all the knowledge the holy men could give them
and they were baptized. When they were so received into the fold Caedwalla
would wait no longer but had them slain. And it is said that they went to
death joyfully, thinking it to be no more than the gate of immortality.

After such deeds Caedwalla still reigned over the kingdom of Sussex and
his other kingdoms, nor did he by speech or manner give the rich or poor
about him to understand whether anything was passing in his heart. But
while they sang Mass in the cathedral of Selsey and while still the
new-comers came (now more rarely, for nearly all were enrolled): while
the new-comers came, I say, in their last numbers from the remotest parts
of the forest ridge, and from the loneliest combes of the Downs to hear
of Christ and his cross and his resurrection and the salvation of men,
Caedwalla sat in Chichester and consulted his own heart only and was a
pagan King. No one else you may say in all the land so kept himself apart.

His youth had been thus spent and he thus ruled, when as his thirtieth
year approached he gave forth a decision to his nobles and to his earls
and to the Welsh-speaking men and to the seafaring men and to the priests
and to all his people. He said: "I will take ship and I will go over the
sea to Rome, where I may worship at the tombs of the blessed Apostles, and
there I will be baptized. But since I am a king no one but the Pope shall
baptize me. I will do penance for my sins. I will lift my eyes to things
worthy of a man. I will put behind me what was dear to me, and I will
accept that which is to come." And as they could not alter Caedwalla
in any of his previous decisions, so they could not alter him in this.
But his people gave gladly for the furnishing of his journey, and all
the sheep of the Downs and their fleece, and all the wheat in the clay
steadings of the Weald, and the little vineyards in the priests' gardens
that looked towards the sea, and the fishermen, and every sort in Sussex
that sail or plough or clip or tend sheep or reap or forge iron at the
hammer ponds, gave of what they had to King Caedwalla, so that he went
forth with a good retinue and many provisions upon his journey to the
tombs of the Apostles.

When King Caedwalla came to Rome the Pope received him and said: "I hear
that you would be instructed in the Faith." To which King Caedwalla
answered that such was his desire, and that he would crave baptism at the
hands of the said Pope. And meanwhile Caedwalla took up good lodgings in
Rome, gave money to the poor, and showed himself abroad as one who had
come from the ends of the earth, that is, from the kingdom of Sussex,
which in those days was not yet famous. Caedwalla, now being thirty years
old and having learnt what one should learn in order to receive baptism,
was baptized, and they put a white robe on him which he was to wear for
certain days.

King Caedwalla, when he was thus made one with the unity of Christian men,
was very glad. But he also said that before he had lost that white robe so
given him, death would come and take him (though he was a young man and a
warrior), and that not in battle. He was certain it was so.

And so indeed it came about. For within the limit of days during which
ritual demanded that the King should wear his white garment, nay, within
that same week, he died.

So those boys who had found death at his hands had died after baptism,
up on Itchen in the Gwent, when Caedwalla the King had journeyed out of
Sussex to conquer and to hold the Wight with his spear and his sword and
his shield, and his captains and his armoured men.

Now that you have done reading this story you may think that I have made
it up or that it is a legend or that it comes out of some storyteller's
book. Learn, therefore, that it is plain history, like the battle of
Waterloo or the Licensing Bill (differing from the chronicle only in this,
that I have put living words into the mouths of men), and be assured that
the history of England is a very wonderful thing.

England has been lucky in its type of subdivision. All over Western
Europe the type of subdivision following in the fall of the Empire has
been of capital importance in the development of the great nations,
but while these have elsewhere been exaggerated to petty kingdoms or
diminished to mere townships in Britain, for centuries the counties have
formed true and lasting local units, and they have survived with more
vigour than the corresponding divisions of the other provinces of Roman
Europe.

That accident of the county moulded and sustained local feeling during
the generations when local government and local initiative were dying
elsewhere; it has preserved a sort of aristocratic independence, the
survival of custom, and the differentiation of the State.

It is not necessarily (as many historians unacquainted with Europe as a
whole have taken for granted) a supreme advantage for any people to escape
from institution of a strong central executive. Such a power is the normal
fruit of all high civilizations. It protects the weak against the strong.
It is necessary for rapid action in war, it makes for clarity and method
during peace, it secures a minimum for all, and it forbids the illusions
and vices of the rich to taint the whole commonwealth.

But though such an escape from strong central government and the
substitution for it of a ruling class is not a supreme advantage, it
has advantages of its own which every foreign historian of England has
recognized, and it is the divisions into counties which, after the change
of religion in the sixteenth century, was mainly responsible for the
slow substitution of local and oligarchic for general, central, and
bureaucratic government in England.

Not all the counties by any means are true to type. All the Welsh
divisions, for instance, are more or less artificial and late, with the
exception of Anglesey. And as for the non-Roman parts, Ireland and the
Highlands of Scotland, it goes without saying that the county never was,
and is not to this day, a true unit. The central and much of the west of
England is the same. That is, the shires are cut as their name implies,
somewhat arbitrarily, from the general mass of territory.

When one says "arbitrarily" one does not mean that no local sentiment
bound them, or that they had not some natural basis, for they had. They
were the territory of central towns: Shrewsbury, Warwick, Derby, Chester,
Oxford, Buckingham, Bedford, Nottingham. But their life was not and has
not since been strongly individual. They have not continuous boundaries
nor an early national root. But all round these, in a sort of ring, run
the counties which have had true local life from the beginning. Cornwall
is utterly different from Devon, and with a clear historic reason for the
difference. Devon, again, is a perfectly separate unit, resulting from a
definite political act of the early ninth century. Of Dorset and Hampshire
one can say less, but with Sussex you get a unit which has been one
kingdom and one diocese, set in true natural limits and lying within
these same boundaries for much more than a thousand years. Kent, probably
an original Roman division, has been one unit for longer still. Norfolk,
Suffolk, and Essex are equally old, though not upon their land boundaries
equally denned; but perhaps the most sharply defined of all—after Sussex,
at least—was Southern and Central Lancashire.

Its topography was like one of those ideal examples which military
instructors take for their models when they wish to simplify a lesson
upon terrain. Upon one side ran the long, high, and difficult range which
is the backbone of England; upon the other the sea, and the sea and the
mountains leant one towards the other, making two sides of a triangle
that met above Morecambe Bay.

How formidable the natural barriers of this triangle were it is not easy
for the student of our time to recognize. It needs a general survey of the
past, and a knowledge of many unfamiliar conditions in the present, to
appreciate it.

The difficulty of those Eastern moors and hills, for instance, the
resistance they offer to human passage, meets you continually throughout
English history. The engineers of the modern railways could give one a
whole romance of it; the story of every army that has had to cross them,
and of which we have record, bears the same witness. The illusion which
the modern traveller may be under that the barrier is negligible is very
soon dispelled when for his recreation he crosses it by any other methods
than the railway; and perhaps in such an experience of travel nothing more
impresses one in the character of that barrier than the
loneliness
.

There is no other corresponding contrast of men and emptiness that I know
of in Europe.

The great towns lie, enormous, pullulating, millioned in the plains on
either side; they push their limbs up far into the valleys. Between them,
utterly deserted, you have these miles and miles of bare upland, like the
roof of a house between two crowded streets.

Merely to cross the Pennines, driving or on foot, is sufficient to teach
one this. To go the length of the hills along the watershed from the
Peak to Crossfell (few people have done it!) is to get an impression of
desertion and separation which you will match nowhere else in travel,
nowhere else, at least, within touch and almost hearing of great towns.

The sea also was here more of a barrier than a bond. Ireland—not Roman,
and later an enemy—lay over against that shore. Its ports (save one)
silted. Its slope from the shore was shallow: the approach and the
beaching of a fleet not easy. Its river mouths were few and dangerous.

This triangle of Lancashire, so cut off from the west and from the east,
had for its base a barrier that completed its isolation. That barrier
was the marshy valley of the Mersey. It could be outflanked only at
its extreme eastern point, where the valley rises to the hundred-foot
contour line. From that point the valley rises so rapidly within half a
dozen miles into the eastern hills that it was dry even under primitive
conditions, and the opportunity here afforded for a passage is marked
by the topographical point of Stockport.

By that gate the main avenues of approach still enter the county. Through
this gap passed the London Road, and passes to-day the London and
North-Western Railway. It was this gate which gave its early strategic
importance to Manchester, lying just north of it and holding the whole of
this corner.

Historians have noted that to hold Manchester was ultimately to hold
Lancashire itself. It was not the industrial importance of the town, for
that was hardly existent until quite modern times: it was its strategic
position which gave it such a character. The Roman fort at the junction
of the two rivers near Knott Mill represented the first good defensible
position commanding this gate upon the south-east.

To enter the county anywhere west of the hundred-foot contour and the
Mersey Valley was, for an army deprived of modern methods, impossible:
a little organized destruction would make it impossible again.

Two artificial causeways negotiated the valley. Each bears to this day (at
Stretford and at Stretton) the proof of its old character, for both words
indicate the passage of a "street," that is, of a hard-made way, over the
soft and drowned land. Stretford was but the approach to Manchester from
Chester—and Manchester thus commanded (by the way) the two south-eastern
approaches to the county, the one natural, the other artificial. The
approach by Stretton gave Warrington its strategic importance in the early
history of the county; Warrington, the central point upon the Mersey,
standing at a clear day's march from Liverpool, the port on the one
hand, and a clear day's march from Manchester on the other. It was from
Warrington that Lord Strange marched upon Manchester at the very beginning
of the Civil War, and if by some accident this stretch of territory should
again be a scene of warfare, Warrington, in spite of the close network of
modern communications, would be the strategic centre of the county
boundary.

So one might take the units out of which modern England has been built
up one by one, showing that their boundaries were fixed by nature, and
that their local separation was not the product of the pirate raids, but
is something infinitely older, older than the Empire, and very probably
(did we know what the Roman divisions of Britain were) accepted under
the Empire. So one might prove or at least suggest that the strategical
character of the English county and of its chief stronghold and barriers
lay in an origin far beyond the limits of recorded history. To produce
such a study would be to add to the truth and reality of our history, for
England was not made nor even moulded by the Danish and the Saxon raids.
The framework is far, far older and so strong that it still survives.