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An Introductory History of England; From the Earliest Times to the Close of the Middle Ages. 1907
An Introductory History of England From the Earliest Times to the Close of the Middle Ages 1907 Author:Charles Robert Leslie Fletcher General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1907 Original Publisher: E. P. Dutton and company Subjects: Great Britain Fiction / Classics History / Europe / Great Britain Literary Collections / General Literary Criticism / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrat... more »ions and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II ROME Tribal government and war, as we have seen, beget kingship, and one is always reading of British "kings." Shakespeare has laid the scene of one of his last and loveliest plays in the reign of one of these kings, called Cymbeline. But I will not ask you to remember even the romanised version of their barbarous names. They lived, not in cities in the Roman sense of the word, but in wattled stockaded villages, and these were chiefly on the lower slopes of the downs, where the clearing of the forests would be easier than on the swampy low lands. A Briton was richer or poorer, as all early peoples are, according as he had more food-bearing land to support him and his family with corn and cattle; all intertribal wars and all invasions are mainly undertaken with a view to getting more food-bearing lands, so that one may eat and drink better : -- " The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter, We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter." That is, after all, the "quintessence of all early war- songs," and the motive of all early wars. Yes, even of Caesar's invasion of Britain. Caesar was busy adding the food-bearing lands of Gaul to the Roman Empire, and in the course of that troublesome job he discovered that the Gauls were being assisted by their British kinsmen. So one fine day he made a raidOESAR IN BRITAIN, 54-55 B. C. 17 into Britain, landing somewhere at the cor...« less