It may be added that in English history there is a considerable proportion of civil war, where the purely military aspect of things is not obscured by the possible or probable results of diversity of race. The conquest of India is also unique in history, for the mode in which it was achieved as well as for its extent. Thus English history gives every variety—its long continuity spreads its great battles over eight centuries, and those battles have been fought against European equals, in internal conflict, against the alien races of India. The only experience which England has not had is that of one armed nation precipitating itself on another; from this we are happily preserved by the narrow seas.
It is probably needless to say that Hastings was not the first battle of English history. The Romans met with desperate resistance in more than one locality before they could complete their conquest of Britain: indeed it was not completed at all, for the wild tribes of the Scottish highlands never submitted. Details are scantily given: some of the principal scenes of conflict cannot even be identified with any certainty. But any one who desires to know how our British ancestors fought against the Romans may feel sure that the narratives given by Caesar of his battles with the Gauls afford a pretty faithful picture of the battles fought by the Celts on this side of the Channel. He may even be content with newspaper accounts of the fighting in Africa between English troops and Soudanese, or Zulus, or Matabeles. The picture of the fierce enthusiasm, the desperate courage, of untrained savages dashing themselves to pieces against the coolness of disciplined troops armed with superior weapons, is essentially the same, whether the legionaries use the _pilum_ or the Maxim gun.
So too, after the Romans had quitted Britain, and the Angles and Saxons came pouring across the narrow seas, the contest between them and the Britons was in some localities most stubborn. The scanty but reasonably trustworthy information which we possess indicates this clearly enough: the kingdom of Wessex in particular extended itself westward very gradually and at the cost of serious battles. The localities of some of these are known, and the geographical and other reasons which led to their taking place on these fields may be fairly well inferred. But of detail there is none, though we may safely conclude that the "dim weird battle of the west" in Tennyson's _Morte d'Arthur_, which belongs to this age so far as it has other than ideal existence, was totally unlike, except for the fury of hand-to-hand conflict, any actual encounter between British king and heathen invaders leagued with his own rebel subjects.