Early Britain

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Weald of Kent or the forests of Arden and Elmet.
Only two elements broke the monotony of these self-sufficing
agricultural communities. Those elements were the monasteries and the
towns.
A large part of the soil of England was owned by the monks. They now
possessed considerable buildings, with stone churches of some
pretensions, in which service was conducted with pomp and
impressiveness. The tiny chapel of St. Lawrence, at Bradford-on-Avon,
forms the best example of this primitive Romanesque architecture now
surviving in England. Around the monasteries stretched their well-tilled
lands, mostly reclaimed from fen or forest, and probably more
scientifically cultivated than those of the neighbouring manors. Most of
the monks were skilled in civilised handicrafts, introduced from the
more cultivated continent. They were excellent ecclesiastical
metalworkers; many of them were architects, who built in rude imitation
of Romanesque models; and others were designers or illuminators of
manuscripts. The books and charters of this age are delicately and
minutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic elaboration of
later medi�val work. The art of painting (almost always in miniature)
was considerably advanced, the figures being well drawn, in rather stiff
but not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective is very imperfectly
understood, and hardly ever attempted. Later Anglo-Saxon architecture,
such as that of Eadward's magnificent abbey church at Westminster
(afterwards destroyed by Henry III. to make way for his own building),
was not inferior to continental workmanship. All the arts practised in
the abbeys were of direct Roman origin, and most of the words relating
to them are immediately derived from the Latin. This is the case even
with terms relating to such common objects as _candle_, _pen_, _wine_,
and _oil_. Names of weights, measures, coins, and other exact
quantitative ideas are also derived from Roman sources. Carpenters,
smiths, bakers, tanners, and millers, were usually attached to the
abbeys. Thus, in many cases, as at Glastonbury, Peterborough, Ripon,
Beverley, and Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery grew into the nucleus of a
considerable town, though the development of such towns is more marked
after than before the Norman Conquest. As a whole, it was by means of
the monasteries, and especially of their constant interchange of inmates
with the continent, that England mainly kept up the touch with the
southern civilisation. There alone was Latin, the universal medium of
continental intercommunication, taught and spoken. There alone were
books written, preserved, and read. Through the Church alone was an
organisation kept up in direct communication with the central civilising
agencies of Italy and the south. And while the Church and the
monasteries thus preserved the connection with the continent, they also
formed schools of culture and of industrial arts for the country itself.
At the abbeys bells were cast, glass manufactured, buildings designed,
gold and silver ornaments wrought, jewels enamelled, and unskilled
labour organised by the most trained intelligence of the land. They thus
remained as they had begun, homes and retreats for those exceptional
minds which were capable of carrying on the arts and the knowledge of a
dying civilisation across the gulf of predatory barbarism which
separates the artificial culture of Rome from the industrial culture of
modern Europe.
The towns were few and relatively unimportant, built entirely of wood
(except the churches), and very liable to be burnt down on the least
excuse. In considering them we must dismiss from our minds the ideas
derived from our own great and complex organisation, and bring ourselves
mentally into the attitude of a simple agricultural people, requiring
little beyond what was produced on each man's own farm or petty holding.
Such people are mainly fed from their own corn and meat, mainly clad
from their own homespun wool and linen. A little specialisation of
function, however, already existed. Salt was procured from the wyches or
pans of the coast, and also from the inland wyches or brine wells of
Cheshire and the midland counties. Such names as Nantwich, Middlewych,
Bromwich, and Droitwich, still preserve the memory of these early
saltworks. Iron was mined in the Forest of Dean, around Alcester, and in
the Somersetshire district. The city of Gloucester had six smiths'
forges in the days of Eadward the Confessor, and paid its tax to the
king in iron rods. Lead was found in Derbyshire, and was largely
employed for roofing churches. Cloth-weaving was specially carried on at
Stamford; but as a rule it is probable that every district supplied its
own clothing. English merchants attended the great fair at St. Denys, in
France, much as those of Central Asia now attend the fair at Kandahar;
and madder seems to have been bought there for dyeing cloth. In Kent,
Sussex, and East Anglia, herring fisheries already produced considerable
results. With these few exceptions, all the towns were apparently mere
local centres of exchange for produce, and small manufactured wares,
like the larger villages or bazaars of India in our own time.
Nevertheless, there was a distinct advance towards urban life in the
later Anglo-Saxon period. B�da mentions very few towns, and most of
those were waste. By the date of the Conquest there were many, and their
functions were such as befitted a more diversified national life.
Communications had become far greater; and arts or trade had now to some
extent specialised themselves in special places.
A list of the chief early English towns may possibly seem to give too
much importance to these very minor elements of English life; yet one
may, perhaps, be appended with due precaution against misapprehension.
The capital, if any place deserved to be so called under the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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