given birth to St. Alban, whom he calls "a man justly eminent for his piety and steadiness in the Christian faith; who with an invincible constancy of mind suffered martyrdom the first man in Britain.1 He relates the legends which were extant in connection with his passion, but while he dwells on his piety and his constancy to the faith which gave him all his fame, he says nothing of his labors as an architect nor does he in any way connect him with Carausius.

We must, therefore, reject the whole story of Carausius and St. Alban as apocryphal; so far as it implies that the Emperor was a great patron of Masonry and the Saint his Master Workman, we find no historical foundation for it; but we may accept it as a mythical statement, the true interpretation of which is that there was a revival of Masonry in England toward the time of the extinction of the Roman domination, through the influence of the Christian missionaries, a fact for the truth of which we have, as has already been seen, sufficient authority.

Anderson says that "the true old Masonry departed from Britain with the Roman legions; for though many Roman families had settled in the south and were blended with the Britons, who had been well educated in the science and the art, yet the subsequent wars, confusions, and revolutions in this island, ruined ancient learning, till all the fine artists were dead without exception.'

Mr. Fergusson, a more learned and more accurate writer than Anderson, has arrived at almost the same conclusion. He says:

"When Rome withdrew her protecting care, France, Spain, and Britain relapsed into, and for centuries remained sunk in, a state of anarchy and barbarism as bad, if not worse than that in which Rome had found them three or four centuries before. It was in vain to expect that the hapless natives could maintain either the arts or the institutions with which Rome had endowed them." "

But Fergusson subsequently makes a very important admission which greatly modifies the opinion he had just expressed when, in continuing the paragraph, he says:

“But it is natural to suppose that they would remember the evidences of her greatness and her power, and would hardly go back for their sepulchers to the unchambered mole-hill barrows of their fore

1 Camden, "Britannia," p. 296.

2 "Constitutions," second edition, p. 59. 3 Fergusson, "Rude Stone Monuments," p. 394.

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fathers, but attempt something in stone, though only in such rude fashion as the state of the arts among them enabled them to execute." This is all that the theory advanced in this work contends for. The assertion of Anderson is altogether too sweeping and general. That of Fergusson admits that the influences of Roman domination had not been entirely obliterated by the departure of the legions. Rome, which had administered the government for centuries, "could hardly fail," to use his own language, "to leave some impress of her magnificence in lands which she had so long occupied."

The concurrent testimony of all historians will not permit us to deny or to doubt that after the extinction of the Roman dominion in Britain, there was a decadence of architecture as well as of the other arts. But this did not amount to a total destruction, but only to a suspension. Nations who have emerged from barbarism to civilization, and who for centuries have enjoyed the refinements of culture, do not at once relapse into their primitive savage state. There was certainly not sufficient time for the exhibition of this ethnological curiosity in the period embraced between the departure of the Romans and the firm establishment of the Anglo-Saxons. Nor was there that isolation which was necessary to hasten this fall from national light to national darkness. The southern parts of Britain, at least, were in too close a propinquity to more civilized and more Romanized Gaul to lose at once all traces of Roman refinement. And above all, the presence and the influence of the Christian missionaries who, coming from Rome, were uninterruptedly engaged in the task of converting the natives to the new faith, must have been a powerful stay to any downward progress to utter barbarism.

The links of the chain that united the builders of Britain with those of Rome had only rusted; they were not rudely snapped asunder. The influence of the methods of building pursued by the Roman Colleges of Artificers, who had done so much work and left so many memorials in Britain, were still to be felt and to be renewed when these links were strengthened and brightened by the Anglo-Saxons.

But this is a new and an important subject that demands consideration in another chapter, for it brings us to an interesting phase in the history of Freemasonry.

1 Fergusson, "Rude Stone Monuments," p. 394

CHAPTER VII

MASONRY AMONG THE ANGLO-SAXONS

FTER the departure of the Roman legions and the withdrawal of the Roman protection, Britain, left to its own resources, was soon harassed by the invasions of Scots and Picts, by predatory excursions of barbarians from the opposite shores of the North Sea, and by civil distractions which were the natural result of

the division of power among many rival petty principalities.

Among the Britons there was one leader, Gwotheyrn, or, as he is more generally called, Vothgern, who seems to have assumed, if he did not legally possess it, a predominating position over the other British princes. Feeling, after various unsuccessful attempts, that he could not, by his unaided forces, repulse the invaders, he sought the assistance of the Saxons.

The Saxons were a tribe of warlike sea-kings who occupied the western shore of what has since been known as the Duchy of Holstein, with the neighboring islands on the coast. Brought across the sea by the invitation of the Britons, they soon expelled the Picts and Scots. But, attracted by the delights of the climate and the fertility of the soil, so superior to the morasses of their own restricted and half-submerged territory, they remained to contest the possession of the island with its native inhabitants.

Hence there followed a series of conflicts which led at last to the expulsion of the native Britons, who were forced to retire to the southwestern parts of the island, and the establishment of the Saxon domination in England.

During the period of intestine wars which led to this change, not only of a government, but of a whole people, it is not to be supposed that much attention could have been paid to the cultivation of architecture or Masonry. Amid the clash of arms the laws are silent, and learning and the arts lie prostrate.

Yet we are not to believe that all the influences of the preceding four or five centuries were wholly paralyzed. Gildas, it is true, complains in querulous language and an involved style,' in the Epistle which is annexed to his History, of the wickedness both of the clergy and the laity, but the greatest licentiousness is not altogether incompatible with the preservation of some remains of the architectural skill and taste which had been originally imparted by the Roman artificers.

The Saxons themselves were not a thoroughly barbarous people. The attempts to subdue the tribes of Germany as they had those of Spain, of Gaul, and of Britain were not very successful. The ferocious bravery of the Germans under the leadership of the great Hermann, romanized into Herminius by Tacitus, was able to stem the progress of the Roman legions in the interior of the country and to confine them eventually to the possession of a few fortresses on the Rhine.

The German tribes, among whom we are, of course, to count the Saxons, were thus enabled to retain their own manners, customs, and language, while their communication with the legions, both in war and in peace, must have imbued them with some portion of Roman civilization.

"Many new ideas, feelings, reasoning and habits," says Mr. Turner, "must have resulted from this mixture, and the peculiar minds and views of the Germans must have been both excited and enlarged. The result of this union of German and Roman improvement was the gradual formation of that new species of the human character and society which has descended, with increasing melioration, to all the modern states of Europe."2

Dr. Anderson, when describing the Saxon invasion of Britain, says that "the Anglo-Saxons came over all rough, ignorant heathens, despising everything but war; nay, in hatred to the Britons and Romans, they demolished all accurate structures and all the remains of ancient learning, affecting only their own barbarous manner of life, till they became Christians."3

1 Of all the post-classical writers in Latin none is so difficult to comprehend or to translate as Gildas. Besides, the fact that there are in existence only two codices of the original manuscript, and that subsequent editions have indulged in many, various, and sometimes contradictory readings, add to the difficulty of a correct interpretation of his writings.

"History of the Anglo-Saxons," i., p. 96. 3" Constitutions," 2d edition, p. 60.

Entick and Northouck, in their subsequent editions of the Book of Constitutions, have repeated this slander, which, even if it were a truth, could not have forever obliterated the connection which we are seeking to trace between the Masonry of the Roman Colleges and that of medieval England; because, although it might have been suspended by Saxon barbarism, it is easy to prove that it could have been renewed by subsequent intercourse with the architects of France.

But against this careless misrepresentation of Anderson and his subsequent editors, let us place the more accurate and better digested views of the historian of the Anglo-Saxons.

Mr. Turner, when writing of the arrival of Hengist with his Saxon followers in England, says:

"The Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain must therefore not be contemplated as a barbarization of the country. Our Saxon ancestors brought with them a superior domestic and moral character, and the rudiments of new political, juridical, and intellectual blessings. An interval of slaughter and desolation unavoidably occurred before they established themselves and their new systems in the island. But when they had completed their conquest, they laid the foundations of that national constitution, of that internal polity, of those peculiar customs, of that female modesty, and of that vigor and direction of mind, to which Great Britain owes the social progress which it has so eminently acquired."1

The fact is that, though the Saxons introduced a style of their own, to which writers on architecture have given their name, they borrowed in their practice of the art the suggestions left by the Romans in their buildings, and used the materials of which they were composed. Thus a writer on this subject says that the Saxons appear to have formed for themselves a tolerably regular and rude style, something midway between the indigenous and the Roman in its details, and he attributes this to the buildings left by the Romans in the country, which, though rare, must have been sufficiently abundant long after their departure from the island.

Abundant evidence will be shown in the course of the present chapter that there was not a total disruption of Saxon architecture

1"History of the Anglo-Saxons," i., p. 179.

2 Paley, "Manual of Gothic Architecture," p. 14.