The Saxons in England: A History of the English Commonwealth Till the Period of the Norman Conquest (Complete‪)‬

Eleven centuries ago, an industrious and conscientious historian, desiring to give a record of the establishment of his forefathers in this island, could find no fuller or better account than this: “About the year of Grace 445-446, the British inhabitants of England, deserted by the Roman masters who had enervated while they protected them, and exposed to the ravages of Picts and Scots from the extreme and barbarous portions of the island, called in the assistance of heathen Saxons from the continent of Europe. The strangers faithfully performed their task, and chastised the Northern invaders; then, in scorn of the weakness of their employers, subjected them in turn to the yoke, and after various vicissitudes of fortune, established their own power upon the ruins of Roman and British civilization.” The few details which had reached the historian taught that the strangers were under the guidance of two brothers, Hengest and Hors: that their armament was conveyed in three ships or keels: that it consisted of Jutes, Saxons and Angles: that their successes stimulated similar adventurers among their countrymen: and that in process of time their continued migrations were so large and numerous, as to have reduced Anglia, their original home, to a desert.

Such was the tale of the victorious Saxons in the eighth century: at a later period, the vanquished Britons found a melancholy satisfaction in adding details which might brand the career of their conquerors with the stain of disloyalty. According to these hostile authorities, treachery and fraud prepared and consolidated the Saxon triumph. The wiles of Hengest’s beautiful daughter subdued the mind of the British ruler; a murderous violation of the rights of hospitality, which cut off the chieftains of the Britons at the very table of their hosts, delivered over the defenceless land to the barbarous invader; and the miraculous intervention of Germanus, the spells of Merlin and the prowess of Arthur, or the victorious career of Aurelius Ambrosius, although they delayed and in part avenged, yet could not prevent the downfall of their people. Meagre indeed are the accounts which thus satisfied the most enquiring of our forefathers; yet such as they are, they were received as the undoubted truth, and appealed to in later periods as the earliest authentic record of our race. The acuter criticism of an age less prone to believe, more skilful in the appreciation of evidence, and familiar with the fleeting forms of mythical and epical thought, sees in them only a confused mass of traditions borrowed from the most heterogeneous sources, compacted rudely and with little ingenuity, and in which the smallest possible amount of historical truth is involved in a great deal of fable. Yet the truth which such traditions do nevertheless contain, yields to the alchemy of our days a golden harvest: if we cannot undoubtingly accept the details of such legends, they still point out to us at least the course we must pursue to discover the elements of fact upon which the Mythus and Epos rest, and guide us to the period and the locality where these took root and flourished.

From times beyond the records of history, it is certain that continual changes were taking place in the position and condition of the various tribes that peopled the northern districts of Europe. Into this great basin the successive waves of Keltic, Teutonic and Slavonic migrations were poured, and here, through hundreds of years, were probably reproduced convulsions, terminated only by the great outbreak which the Germans call the wandering of the nations. For successive generations, the tribes, or even portions of tribes, may have moved from place to place, as the necessities of their circumstances demanded; names may have appeared, and vanished altogether from the scene; wars, seditions, conquests, the rise and fall of states, the solemn formation or dissolution of confederacies, may have filled the ages which intervened between the first settlement of the Teutons in Germany, and their appearance in history as dangerous to the quiet of Rome.