In some cases, the conquered tribes moved on to other lands, leaving their former homes to their conquerors.  In this way the Britons and Gaels gave up the greater part of their land to the Angles and Saxons and withdrew to the hills and mountains of Wales, Cornwall, and northern Scotland.  In other cases, the conquered people and their conquerors inhabited the same lands side by side, as the Normans settled down in England among the Anglo-Saxons.

In the early days of savagery, one tribe would frequently make a raid upon another neighboring tribe and bring home with it some captives who became slaves, working without pay for their conquerors and possessing no more rights than beasts of burden. (This custom exists today in the interior of Africa, and was responsible for the infamous African slave trade.  Black captives were sold to white traders through the greed of their captors, who forgot that their own relatives and friends might be carried off and sold across the seas by some other tribe of blacks.)

When these slaves were kept as the servants of their conquerors, their number was very small as compared with that of their masters.  When, on the other hand, a tribe settled among a people whom they had conquered, they often found themselves fewer in numbers, and kept their leadership only by their greater strength and fighting ability.

Here there had arisen a new situation:  all men were no longer equal, led by a chief of their own choosing, but instead, the greater part of them now had no voice in the government.  They had become subjects, working to earn their own living and also, as has been said, to support in idleness their conquerors.

This ability of the few to rule the many and force them to support their masters was increased as certain peoples learned better than others how to make strong armor and effective weapons.  Nearly five hundred years before the time of Christ, at the battle of Marathon (Mar’a thon), the Greeks discovered that one Greek, clad in metal armor and armed with a long spear, was worth ten Persians wearing leather and carrying a bow and arrows or a short sword.  One hundred and sixty years later, a small army of well-equipped Macedonian Greeks, led by that wonderful general, Alexander the Great, defeated nearly forty times its number of Persians in a great battle in Asia and conquered a vast empire.

[Illustration:  Alexander Defeating the Persians]

In later times, as better and better armor was made, the question of wealth entered in.  The chief who had money enough to buy the best arms for his men could defeat his poorer neighbor and force him to pay money as to a ruler.  Finally, in the so-called “Middle Ages,” before the invention of gunpowder, one knight, armed from crown to sole in steel, was worth in battle as much as one hundred poorly-armed farmers or “peasants” as they are called in Europe.