But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediæval man for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed. Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf’s ‘History of Crowland’ (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf and his continuator, ‘Peter of Blois;’ and though their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of the men of old. Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge. There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac (‘The Battle-Play,’ the ‘Sport of War’), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old ‘law,’ as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went well to the end.