The new England was a heathen country.

Homestead and boundary, the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced Christ.
As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse to the land over which it passed.

But if the new England which sprang from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had been destroyed.

The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by tyranny, political and social, into serfdom.

The base of the new English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting for himself by the Northern Sea.