CHAPTER III

THE BARBARIAN AT THE WALLS

For a whole hundred years now, that is from A.D. 200 to 300, this greatest story in the world is really made up of a succession of small stories, each almost exactly the same as the last. They are stories about the "barbarian," at some point or other of the boundaries of the Empire, trying to break through, here and there succeeding in making a breach in the wall, and penetrating into the Empire, but again and again being thrust back, so that the old boundaries, as established by Hadrian, were on the whole tolerably well maintained all through this hundred years.

The first serious break in the wall was made by a tribe called the Franks, from the east side of the Rhine, breaking through the boundary between the Empire and Germany. There was at least one other tribe in alliance with the Franks in this invasion, but it is the Franks of whom we should, I think, take notice particularly, because here we find them for the first time in what the Romans called Gaul, and in what is now called, from these very Franks, or from their descendants, France.

[Sidenote: The Gallic Empire]

But they did not remain long in Gaul at that time. They were driven out by the legions. And the legions in that province had to do the work of driving them out without getting any help from Rome. The result of that was that these legions, finding that they had to rely on themselves, thought that they might as well have a government of their own. They {15} chose an "emperor" for themselves, a "Gallic Empire" was founded--the Empire of Gaul--and it was obeyed even across the Pyrenees, in Spain, and across the Channel, in Britain. This so-called Gallic Empire had an existence of about thirty years, after which it was overthrown and the Empire of Rome was re-established over Gaul.

The story was almost exactly repeated in other parts of the Empire. The Goths, a tribe perhaps of the same race and origin as the Franks, and of similar habits, but living not so far towards the north, broke in across the Danube. They were a very formidable force, and overran the Balkans. They defeated a Roman army, under the Emperor Decius himself, and Decius was killed in the battle. We must not allow ourselves to be misled by the term "barbarian," applied by the Romans to all these peoples, and to think of them as mere savages. These Goths had possessions on the Black Sea and they are said to have sent out, during this century, a fleet estimated at 500 ships which made incursions along the coasts of Asia Minor and Greece as formidable as any that the Vikings, later on, made further north. They actually stormed and pillaged such cities as Corinth and Athens.

Further east the Persians came pressing in upon the Empire. They were defeated and driven back by the Syrian _dux Orientis_, duke of the East, as he was called. He was no more than a high official, appointed by Rome, but after this success against the Persians he proclaimed himself as an independent prince, the Prince of Palmyra. Zenobia, his widow, who succeeded him in his real power, though a young son was the successor to his title, maintained the independence of Palmyra, and even conquered Egypt, but again there happened that which we have seen more than once in the course of the great story--the {16} enemies of Rome prevail against her for a while, until she is provoked to put forth her full strength against them; but, once she is roused to strenuous action, they go down before her. Zenobia was defeated and brought in triumph to Rome about twenty-four years before the end of the century, and in A.D. 300 the Roman Empire stood within its bounds not greatly changed from its bounds of a hundred years before. There was, however, a real, if not a very visible, difference: the "barbarians," although for the time thrust back, had probably learnt that the Roman power was not quite invincible; and the legions guarding the frontiers had learnt that they had to rely on their own forces, without assistance from the central headquarters at Rome, for repelling the barbarians, and therefore felt less disposed to look on Rome as their master.

[Sidenote: The barbarians]

The condition of the Empire within its frontiers was far less prosperous at the close than it had been at the beginning of the century. We saw how the Greek thought and culture had been carried along the Roman roads to the far boundaries of the Empire. But although the barbarian armies were still kept outside those boundaries, a great many of the barbarians had come to settle within the Empire and had been taken into the legions. No doubt some of them learned the arts and the wisdom and the civilisation which the Romans had learnt from the Greeks, but on the other hand they prevented the spreading of these good lessons throughout the world. If they became somewhat "Romanised," the Roman Empire at the same time became somewhat "barbarised," by their coming in. Moreover Gaul, as we have seen, had been the scene of war, and so, too, parts of Italy itself, Greece, the Balkans, as we should call the district now, Asia Minor and Egypt. There was scarcely a corner of the Empire in which the _Pax {17} Romana_, had not been broken. Therefore the fields were waste, the population diminished, the towns were partially abandoned, trade was nearly at a standstill. Disease and lack of food followed in the train of war.

Thus, although the boundaries of the Empire stood in the year A.D. 300 much as they had stood a hundred years before, the Empire within had grown far weaker. If the barbarian should break through again, as it was most likely that he would, there would not be the old strength to repel him. But, before we come to the actual breaking-through point, we would do well to consider a question which I expect will have come to your minds: What sort of people, of what race, and of what habits of life were these barbarians, so-called, and what was the reason why they kept on thus trying to break in upon the Empire?

We get our first knowledge of the way of life of these barbarians from the great Roman historian Tacitus; and his account is especially interesting to us, who are English, because it is the account of the way in which those people lived who were our own ancestors. For the very name of English or Englishmen, we may take it, was not known in the Britain of that day, nor for some time after A.D. 300. There were English, as we have noted, in Sleswig, and to north and south of them were Jutes and Saxons. The three were closely allied in race and in language, and the Romans, because they came into touch with the Saxons chiefly, the most southern of the tribes, called them all Saxon. It seems, however, that among themselves they commonly used the word English, which strictly was the name of the nation or tribe in the middle, to include all three tribes. All were Englishmen, but the Jutes and Saxons were distinct, though allied, tribes within the English description.

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The barbarians that Tacitus writes of lived to the south and east of these, on the eastern side of the Rhine, but what he has to say about them we may take to apply to those forefathers of our own, because, just as the name English included Jutes and Saxons, so too the English and many others, such as the Goths and the Franks, were all to be included under a name of wider meaning still. All were related. All spoke a language which had evidently come from the same original source, though different tribes had learnt to speak rather differently because they had lived far apart from each other for a great many years. All had very similar customs and ways of life, and the same religion. Christianity had not yet come to them.

[Sidenote: Tacitus on the Goths]

What Tacitus tells us is that all these allied nations were made up of people living the life of farmers. They liked to live separately from each other, in families apart. Their farm would consist of as much plough land as the head of the family and his sons and daughters could work and keep in good order, and as much pasture land as his cattle required. These farmers would be established in the midst of the great forests which covered all the land. They would be either in natural glades in these forests or in clearances made by the people themselves.

Each family lived by itself on its farm; but within a certain region there would be a collection of these farms, not far apart from each other; and this gathering of farms would form a tribe, or a division within a tribe, by itself, apart from any other tribe. And immediately surrounding each tribal group it seems as if the forest was always left in its natural state, so that there was a wide strip, or "mark"--a word we find later in the form of the "march" and the "marches"--between one and the other. This strip was always dangerous to traverse. It was the home {19} of wild beasts. Moreover the farmers imagined it to be the home of evil spirits of many kinds which might lead men astray and destroy them. And it was necessary, if a man did have the courage and fortune to make his way safely through this terrible belt of forest, that he should sound his horn loudly as he passed the further side of it and came into the farmed land of one of another tribe. If he did not give notice of his coming by this horn-blowing, he was to be suspected as an enemy, and was liable to be killed without further inquiry.

Thus, you see, these communities were made up of men owning their own land. They were free-holders, as we should say. And, because they owned land, they had the rights of free-holders, or free men. The right, really, was the right of self-government. For although they lived so much apart from each other, and were, as Tacitus tells us, very much attached to their independent way of living, yet they had intercourse together. To the Roman historian, accustomed to the crowded cities of Italy, their solitary way of living would naturally seem extraordinary, and very likely it was not quite so solitary as his description would make us think. They had, at all events, their government, their laws and customs, and had, as it appears, perfect liberty for arranging all these for themselves.

They used to meet from time to time, probably at a set time once a year, in a certain place, generally a hill, to which a certain sacredness was ascribed on that account, and there they would hold courts of law, to settle disputes brought before them, and would impose sentences, and discuss matters of interest to the tribe generally. Every free-man, every free-holder of land, had a right to be there and to give his vote. The man who had no land had no vote; he had no rights. So it was held a dreadful thing in {20} those days to be a "land-less" man. These free-holders were called "ceorls" (in later English, "churls"), and "ceorl" really means "man"; as if to imply that those who had not the right which the possession of land gave were hardly men at all. And of the "ceorls" there were some larger proprietors, who were called "eorls" (later "earls"). From that word too we get the "eorldermen" (or eldermen), who sometimes deliberated apart at the meetings and were greatly considered, as men of position and wisdom. But they had no rights over the "ceorls," except such as the "ceorls" voted to them and might take back again by vote.

If any man deemed himself injured by another he could bring his case before the court, and if he made it good the court would award him compensation for the injury done him in the form of some cattle, or other valuable property to be given over to him by the man that did him the injury. The amount of the compensation it would be part of the work of the court of law to settle when it was assembled at the "mote hill" or place where the eldermen of the tribe gathered for the purpose.

But, you may say, that is all very well for the man who had suffered an injury that was not fatal. You could compensate him, perhaps. But how about a man that had been killed? You could not very well compensate him.

You could not. All you could do in a case like this would be to make the killer give compensation, in form of a heavy fine of cattle or goods, to the wife and family of the murdered man. But that would not be enough: the killer must be personally punished too, probably with death.

And then you may say that, if he was to be punished with death, it would not much matter to him how many of his cattle or how much of his goods were {21} taken from him and given to the family of the man he had killed.

[Sidenote: The Gothic family]

It would not--to him personally; but it would matter to his wife and family. They would be the poorer by the amount of the fine that was paid. And it is thought likely that it was in this way that the custom grew of looking upon the family of a person who had suffered wrong as the people who were to be compensated for the wrong, rather than the sufferer himself; and also of looking upon the family of the man who had done the wrong as the people who should make the compensation, rather than the wrong-doer himself.

The result of that was to make each person in the family look upon every other person of the same family as one whose acts might make a great deal of difference to him. The whole family had to suffer when any of its members did wrong: the whole family had a claim against a person who had wronged one of its members.

So they had this sentiment, that all the members of a family were dependent each on the acts of the other, and that they must suffer together when wrong was done; but in other ways they were very independent people.

They seem to have been generally tall and big, both men and women. They had light hair, which even the men allowed to grow long, so as to fall on their shoulders, blue eyes and fair complexions.

That is a general description which may serve for all the tribes of the barbarians which came knocking on the northern and eastern walls of the Empire in Europe all the way down from Sleswig, where the Saxons were, to the lands occupied by the Goths, some of whom lived as far east as the shores of the Black Sea, where they had formed, as we have seen, a large fleet. It is possible for a general account like this to serve for the many different tribes and nations {22} into which the barbarians on this boundary of the Empire were split up, because they were all of one race originally, rather as we of Great Britain and most of the Americans are of the Anglo-Saxon race, although we are now of different nations.

All these peoples, of whom it is convenient to speak by the Roman term of barbarians, were of the great family of mankind that is called the Indo-European--that is the more general name, including them all, of which I wrote a few pages back. It is given that name, because some of the family went south, into India, and some west, into Europe, out of some region in the north and east, which seems to have been a great hive or nursery of mankind out of which we came swarming south and west.

This hive seems to have had its home perhaps in the west of Russia; but little is known about it. Probably it would be more right to speak of many hives, scattered over a large region, than of one. But we may know that the scattered members of the family--those in India and those in Europe--are related by the similarity of some of the most common words, or parts of words, in the languages of India and of those lands of which the European members of the family got possession.

Besides its troubles from the threats of these barbarians on its north-west borders, the Empire, as we have seen, had its troubles through most of this century from Persians and others on the south-east; and I now want to ask you to notice an effect of these troubles and threats of trouble on the Empire itself, for it was an effect which made a very great difference to the story. This effect was the dividing up of the one Empire into two, with a Western Empire, as of old, having its seat of government at Rome; but also with an Eastern Empire having its centre of government at Byzantium, as Constantinople was then called.

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