Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/375

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 355 arms and horses, to maintain a military force of slaves of peasants, and of licentious followers ; and the chieftain mi"-ht assume, within his own domain, the powers of a civil magistrate. Several of these British chiefs might be the genuine posterity of ancient kings ; and many more would be tempted to adopt this honourable genealogy, and to vindicate their hereditary claims, which had been suspended by the usurpation of the Caesars. ^^^ Their situation and their hopes would dispose them to affect the dress, the language, and the customs of their ancestors. If the princes of Britain relapsed into barbarism, while the cities studiously preserved the laws and manners of Rome, the whole island must have been gradually divided by the distinction of two national parties ; again broken into a thousand subdivisions of war and faction, by the various pi'ovocations of interest and resentment. The public strength, instead of being united against a foreign enemy, was consumed in obscure and intestine quarrels ; and the personal merit which had placed a successful leader at the head of his equals might enable him to subdue the freedom of some neighbouring cities, and to claim a rank among the tyrants ^^^ who infested Britain after the dissolution of the Roman government. III. The British church might be composed of thirty or forty bishops,^^^ -vvith an adequate proportion of the inferior clergy ; and the want of riches (for they seem to have been poor ^^^) would compel them to deserve the public esteem by a decent and exemplary behaviour. The interest, as well as the temper, of the clergy was favourable to the peace and union of their distracted country ; those salutary lessons might be of Gaul in 409 and 411-13] on his own estate near Sisteron, in the second Narbon- nese, and named by him Theopolis. [See C. I. L. xii. 1524 ; the stone is on the road from Sister on to St. Genies in Provence. Dardanus is not stated to have given its name to the village or castle of Theopolis (now hamlet of Thfen), but to have given it walls and gates. ] 190 The establishment of their power would have been easy indeed, if we could adopt the impracticable scheme of a lively and learned antiquarian ; who supposes that the British monarchs of the several tribes continued to reign, though with subordinate jurisdiction, from the time of Claudius to that of Honorius. See Whitaker's History of Manchester, vol. i. p. 247-257. 191 'AAV oucra invo Tvpavfoii an' avTov e/xeve. Procopius, de Bell. Vandal. L 1. c. 2, p. 181. Britannia fertilis provincia tyrannorura, was the expression of Jerom, in the year 415 (tom. ii. p. 255, ad Ctesiphont. ). By the pilgrims, who resorted every year to the Holy Land, the Monk of Bethlem received the earliest and most accurate intelligence. 192 See Bingham's Eccles. Antiquities, vol. i. 1. ix. c. 6, p. 394. [A discreet and important paper on Early British Christianity by Mr. F. Haverfield appeared in Eng. Hist. Review, July, 1896. The archceological evidence is mustered. J 193 It is reported of fhree British bishops who assisted at the council of Rimini, A.D. 359, tam pauperes fuisse ut nihil [proprium] haberent. Sulpicius Severus, Hist. Sacra, 1. ii. p. 420 [c 41]. Some of their brethren, however, were in better circumstances.