Instead, therefore, of being thrilled into ecstasy by the landing of the Germans at Ebbsfleet, one may more reasonably regard the episode as untoward and discreditable. It is more satisfactory to contemplate the return in the train of Duke William of Normandy of those numerous Britons who "with sorrowful hearts had fled beyond the seas," and to appreciate that by the Battle of Hastings the temporary ascendancy of Germanic kultur was finally and irrevocably destroyed. It is observed by Green that the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers but of a Roman world which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. This is sufficiently true as regards the Saxon sword, but as some of the native coins in question are now universally assigned to a period 200 to 100 years earlier than the first coming of the Romans, it is obvious that there must have been sufficient civilisation then in the country to require a coinage, and that the native Britons cannot have been the poor and backward barbarians of popular estimation. A coin is an excessively hard fact, and should be of just as high interest to the historian as a well-formed skull or any other document. To Englishmen our prehistoric coinage--a national coinage "scarcely if at all inferior to that of contemporary Rome"--[29] ought to possess peculiar and special interest, for it is practically in England alone that early coins have been discovered, and neither Scotland, Wales, nor Ireland can boast of more than very few. It is, however, an Englishman's peculiarity that possessing perhaps the most interesting history, and some of the most fascinating relics in the world, he is either too modest or too dull to take account of them. The plate of coins illustrated on page 364, represents certain _sceattae_ which, according to Hawkins, may have been struck during the interval between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Saxons. One would at least have thought that such undated minor-monuments would have possessed _per se_ sufficient interest to ensure their careful preservation. Yet, according to Hawkins, these rude and uncouth pieces are scarce, "because they are rejected from all cabinets and thrown away as soon as discovered".[30]