Open [38.2 MB]

Ireland and the Making of Britain
religion of the English, nor to correspond with them any
more than with Pagans." 1
The English reciprocated the antipathy of the Britons.
Thus in the Anglo-Saxon legend of St. Guthlac2 we find
a curious assertion that St. Guthlac, having been among
the British, understood the speech of the devils, who used
that language.
3.
REPUTATION OF ENGLISH ABORIGINES AMONG CIVI-
LIZED PEOPLES
To this sentiment of irreconcilability is it due that of
all the barbarian races that descended upon the Roman
provinces the Anglo-Jute-Saxons alone found civilization
bodily withdrawing as they advanced. In other countries
religion, administrative order and the appurtenances of
learning were gradually assumed and assimilated by the
newcomers. Britain was almost the only province of the
empire where Roman civilization disappeared with the
people who enshrined and administered it. The antipathy
excited in the breast of the Romanized Briton became
an insuperable barrier to the blending or association of
races, and receding towards Britannia Secunda and
Strathclyde before the violence of the new settlers they
carried their whole organization of government and
society with them. Thus the Anglo-Jute-Saxon invader
was condemned to remain as much the primeval savage
amid the noble monuments of Roman refinement and
power as on the wastes of Sleswick or Jutland.
To this primitive people, capable only of such ratiocina-
tion as was needed to maintain a purely animal existence,
1 Hist. Eccl.
2 Contained in the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Book, a collection of Anglo-
Saxon poems given by Bishop Leofric to the library of the cathedral of
Exeter, between 1046 and 1073, and published by the London Society of Antiquarians
in 1842. The legend concerning Guthlac (c. 673-714) is a metrical
paraphrase of the Latin life by Felix, a monk of Croyland Abbey.
198