Thus we read of contests between the men of Kent and the West Saxons, or between conflicting nobles in Wessex itself.

Fighting, in fact, was the one business of the English freeman, and it was but slowly that he settled down into a quiet agriculturist.

The influence of Christianity alone seems to have wrought the change.

Before the conversion of England, all the glimpses which we get of the English freeman represent him only as a rude and turbulent warrior, with the very spirit of his kinsmen, the later wickings of the north.
An enormous amount of the country still remained overgrown with wild forest.

The whole weald of Kent and Sussex, the great tract of Selwood in Wessex, the larger part of Warwickshire, the entire Peakland, the central dividing ridge between the two seas from Yorkshire to the Forth, and other wide regions elsewhere, were covered with primaeval woodlands.
Arden, Charnwood, Wychwood, Sherwood, and the rest, are but the relics of vast forests which once stretched over half England.