Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/146

men could be transported, in any way, from the shores of Norway or Denmark to the coasts of England or France. Fixed social arrangements too, combinations of industry working for a common purpose, laws and security of person and property, military organisation and discipline, must have been established and understood, in a way and to an extent not at all necessary to be presupposed in the case of a tumultuous crowd migrating by land to new settlements. Do the architectural remains, or the history of the Anglo-Saxon people, or of any other, in the 8th or 9th century, and down to the 13th, give us any reasonable ground for supposing among them so wide a diffusion of the arts of working in wood and iron, of raising or procuring by commerce flax or hemp, of the arts of making ropes, spinning, and weaving sail-cloth, preserving provisions, coopering water casks, and all the other combinations of the primary arts of civilised life, implied in the building and fitting out vessels to carry three or four hundred men across the ocean, and to be their resting place, refuge, and home for many weeks, months, and on some of their viking cruises even for years? There is more of civilisation, and of a diffusion of the useful arts on which civilisation rests, implied in the social state of a people who could do this, than can be justly inferred from a people quarrying stones, and bringing them to the hands of a master-builder to be put together in the shape of a church or castle. Historians tell us that when Charlemagne, in the 9th century, saw some piratical vessels of the Northmen cruising at a distance in the Mediterranean, to which they had for the first time found their way, that he turned away from the window, and burst into tears. Was it the barbarism of these pirates, or their civilisation, their comparative superiority in the art of navigation, and of all belonging to it, that moved him? None of the