As I looked lazily over to Bardsey, with sunset on its streaming rocks, from the shelter of this quiet bay, I considered the islands.
Bardsey, they say, has a little community on board which governs itself and elects its own king. Whether it also pays tribute to some rich man on land, I do not know. But all the islands around Britain tend to be little kingdoms of their own: Lundy is like that, and over and over again one finds similar islands owned by one man, living either alone like a beast or companioned like a patriarch with his family and his servants and tenants all round about him; and the truth is that man is happier in small kingdoms than in great.
Except for the pride and honour of belonging to a great kingdom, to be citizen of a small one seems to me to have all the advantages. In a great kingdom you have to pay heavy taxes. You are made falsely concerned with men whom you never see, and in doings far distant, which you do not understand; you bear on your shoulders the burden of millions, and you must suffer a capital city, which will be a sink of crime. Your rulers will grow rich by deceit—for a very large community can always be deceived; nothing about you will be real, and the mass of your fellow citizens will be desperately poor. For it is the nature of large communities to separate into strata and for the mass to grow indigent.
But now I come to think of it, there is one advantage in belonging to a large kingdom, which is, that you can enjoy differences and contrasts such as a small kingdom does not give you. Some day, perhaps very soon, the modern organisation of society into great communities will break down, and then it would be amusing to come to life again and see the little communities living their own independent lives as they did in the Dark Ages, and also in the beginnings of pagan history.
How pleasant it is to consider the little kingdom of Ithaca, and Cephalonia alongside, and the little territory of the Athenians! How pleasant it is to remember that there were four kings in Kent, grouped there under one dread emperor at Canterbury! and also how there was a king with two princes, his heirs, governing the Isle of Wight; all pagan when the rest of England had already gone Catholic. For though you often hear it said that Sussex was the last piece of English soil to remain pagan (and it is, indeed, the great boast of my county that it resisted the Faith for one hundred years, and only capitulated under duress and famine) it is not so. Sussex was not the last of England to growl in a reluctant font. The Wight beat us by a head. At that time our king of Sussex and part of Hants as well, by name Cædwalla, a Welsh name, was still pagan; and, when he did get religion, he thought himself too grand to be baptised by anybody except the Pope of Rome. To Rome, therefore, he went, and reached the City, was baptised, and then died out of hand of fever—a warning to Pride.
But he had something to show for it all, since the Pope, very much impressed that a king of Sussex itself (and part of Hants by conquest) should have visited him, wrote a fine epitaph for him in Latin verse and had it engraved on a stone which he put upon his grave in Old Saint Peter’s. But they pulled it up when New Saint Peter’s was built, and to this sacrilege I set down the very bad luck that Rome had afterwards.
Anyhow, the truth is that not Sussex but the Isle of Wight was the last pagan spot in these islands, and here we of Sussex must reluctantly yield the palm. Yet can we in Sussex always boast that our king was the last of the kings in Britain to worship the Devil twelve hundred years ago. And so again for Bardsey.
Looking at Bardsey over an evening sea now less tumbled and under the dying gale, I thought also how odd it was that such Scandinavian names should have stuck to some places more than to others. These pirates of the eighth and ninth centuries were not many in number. They had no culture or traditions; no literature; no anything. It was not until England had gradually civilised them and made them Christian that they produced anything whatsoever. How then did little bits of their language stick on to portions of our coast? They say that “Dublin” is a Scandinavian name. “Bardsey” certainly is, and so is the word “sound,” to mean a passage of the sea, and “Skomer” is Scandinavian, and, right high up in the estuary of the Severn, “Flatholm” and “Steepholm” are both surely Scandinavian. People explain it sometimes by saying that as the attack of the pirates was always necessarily from the sea, they would give their names to the sea places. I could understand how this would give them Scandinavian names in Scandinavia, but how did we come to adopt such names? That is the puzzle. I should have thought that the local Celtic name for Bardsey would have held out. It has not done so, at least not in our speech; and there are even Scandinavian names for inland places, such as the main hill of the Isle of Man, and many places in the Lakes and beyond.
But the whole story of words is full of mystery, and the attempt to reduce the process of words to a science has always seemed to me ridiculous enough. It is true that certain habits get formed, and you can, from them, build up certain
