The Soil (. . . 1850)
Its new habitation much to Its liking. It awakened the fossilized monsters and dragons into a second existence; they lived again, as brooding shadows, magical, mysterious, terrible.
Hardy Danes, fiery and volatile people, charged over from the southeast coast; their raids harried the land. Æthelstan, Ælfred, Æthelred, sober kings and true, spent their lives pruning their spear-hedges in continuous campaigns of defence. Mounds that had served the Stone-Age men, the Britons and the Romans in turn, were again used as barriers against the invading marauders. Peace approached on belated pinions.
Missionaries had arrived from Rome; the barbarians were gradually won over to baptism and to lip-service of the Lord, His Risen Son, the Virgin Mother and the Holy Saints. Church towers bore aloft the Sign of the Cross. But Wyrd, unconquered, brooding, nursing its monsters in the hearts of the land-folk, smiled grimly through it all.
Henceforward the history of Wessex becomes the history of the English nation. The Dukes of Normandy, having vanquished the last of the Saxon monarchs, imposed their feudal lordship over the country. Ecclesiastical architecture of the Perpendicular type dominated the towns.
For more than seven centuries, this Anglo-Norman civilization held sway. The Hardys had arrived and were proliferating. The Swetmans and the Childses, by dint of Habsburgian intermarrying, had populated the heart of Wessex, covered it with substantial barns and houses of stone, built to endure for many generations.
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