the three tribes were
far from being mere savages. They were fierce warriors, but they were
also busy fishers and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in
handling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which they
hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling sword and spear.
They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the
"ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel
might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose
in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and
dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or
mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang
the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of art
and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings,
amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved in their workmanship the
deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden
buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes with rough jewels
and inlaid with enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like the honour in
which the smith was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn
by their form to be of English workmanship. It is only in the English
pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find
traces of utter rudeness.

[Sidenote: Religion]

The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German
peoples. Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of
the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of
the north. The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god,
the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first
ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still
recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German
homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder,
the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of
peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
maidens, brought increase to every field and sta