st and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons,
helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of
the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to
their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we
catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he plunged into the sea to
meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy
waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love
he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English
verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird"
as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan" as its curved prow breasted
the "swan-road" of the sea.

Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general
movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed
faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of
fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of
vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one
of the war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed,
seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards
fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as t