How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of bitter warfare.

But it was just through the length of the struggle that of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave the main facts untouched.

The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D.600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)] For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to the settlement of his conqueror.

What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome.

In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman.