An Essay On English Municipal History
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SAXON TOWN INSTITUTIONS. On the departure of the Eomans, the bond uniting the British Towns was removed; they were no longer confederated under one supreme head, and capable of presenting a phalanx of resistance, if need was, to an enemy; they became so many separate and detached bodies, each acting by itself and for itself, and perhaps in some cases rivalries and enmities existed among them, and armed collisions had taken place between their inhabitants. Alliances and counter-alliances might also have been formed between others of the municipalities. To these causes of disunion may be added the fact, which is now clearly established, that in certain stations the people being almost wholly of one race?perhaps Teutonic, perhaps Gaulish, though more often the former?invited from Germany and Franc
...e immigrants to settle among them, and thus antagonisms of race as well as of interest and policy supervened. It is stated, on the authority of inscriptions and other monuments, that the population of the towns was becoming more and more Teutonic by the arrival of recruits from the Continent, as the close of the Eoman rule drew near; until at length, "there can be little doubt that German blood predominated, to a great extent, in many of the Eoman cities in Britain." When this disintegration of the political system of the island was completed, the progress of invasion must have been rapid. As tribe after tribe of Saxons and Angles pressed inland, the cities became a prey, more or less easy, to the fierce and irresistible invaders; in those places where their kinsmen were settled, they were admittedwithin the walls by consent, and probably under compact? in other cases, they besieged the terrified and comparatively powerless townsmen, and overwhelmed them by their ferocit...
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