Despite the border wars the Romanised Britons got on fairly comfortably until the failing power of the Roman Empire made it necessary for the Roman legions to withdraw to Italy. This left Romanised Britain to be attacked by the wilder Britons of the north and the west. That these attacks should have been as successful as they were, hints that the south Briton of England was rather a soft fellow. Since, as we will find later, the Anglo-Saxon--once comfortably settled in England--showed a tendency also to become a soft fellow, and had to be pricked to greatness by the Dane and the Norman, it would almost seem that this gentle, green, cloudy England has ultimately a softening effect on its inhabitants. But fresh blood pours in to bring vigour. England invites adventurers by her beauty and then tames them. Because of her perpetual invitation the British nation has been made of a brew of Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman bloods, and all these people have left their mark on the landscape of the country. CHAPTER II THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS How the Romanised Briton of England would have fared ultimately in his contest with the more savage Britons of the north and the west, who came to rob him down to his toga, if they had been left to fight it out, it is hard to say. Probably the course of events would have been that the English natives would first have yielded to the northern invaders, and afterwards absorbed them and made them partakers in their civilisation. [Illustration: RICHMOND, YORKSHIRE A town of considerable importance at the time of the Norman Conquest] But the issue was never fought out. There had begun the most momentous swarming of a human race that history records. Along the Scandinavian and the Danish peninsulas, and the northern coast of Germany, there had been swelling up a vast population of fierce, strong, courageous and hungry men; Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen--they were all very much akin: big blue-eyed men of mighty daring mated with fair, chaste, fruitful women; and they swarmed out of their warrens to over-run the greater part of Europe. You may trace them to the interior of Russia, to Iceland, to Constantinople, some think to North America. But, whatever their path, the British Islands were athwart the track they took, and the British Islands received the most complete flood of Anglo-Saxon blood. Again it was England that made way most easily to the invader. The Anglo-Saxons came and cleared out the Romanised and Christian civilisation from Yorkshire to Kent. But the fiercer British natives who had held back the Romans, held back also these new invaders, helped thereto by the fact that their lands seemed to be hungry, and to offer but little booty. England, fat, fertile, like a beautiful park with its forests and meadows and rivers, was at once a richer and an easier prize.