with the terror of their name. In the North too they are mentioned
together with Scots and Attacotti. When now the Roman rule over the
island and the surrounding seas came to an end, to whom could it pass?
To the peaceful Provincials, if they could indeed gird on the sword,
or to the old companions in arms of the Romans? There is no doubt
that the same general impulse which urged on the German peoples, in
the great revolution of affairs, into the Roman provinces, led the
enterprising inhabitants of the German and Northern coasts, Frisians,
Angles, and Jutes, as well as Saxons, into Britain. A fearful war
broke out, in which it may be true to say the ruined towns became the
sepulchres of their inhabitants, but no man found the quiet time
necessary for depicting its details. After it had filled a century and
a half with its horrors, and men again lifted up their eyes, they
found the island divided between two great nationalities, which had
separated themselves as opposing forces. The natives had as good as
abandoned the civilisation they had learnt from Rome, and leant on
their kinsfolk in North Gaul, and the Scots in Ireland and the
Highlands; they occupied the west of the island. The Germans were
settled in the east, in the greatest part of the south, and in the
north, in most of the old Roman settlements,--but they were far from
forming a united body. Not seven or eight merely, but a large number
of little tribal kingdoms, occupied or fought for the ground.

If we wish to point out in general the distinction between the
Anglo-Saxon and other German settlements, it lies in this, that they
rested neither on the Emperor's authorisation whether direct or
indirect, nor on any agreement with the natives of the land. In Gaul
Chlodwig assumed and carried on the authority of the Roman Empire;--in
Britain it went wholly to the ground. Hence it was that here the
German ideas could develop in their full purity, more so than in
Germany itself, over which the Frankish monarchy, which had also
adopted Roman tendencies, had gained influence.

Just as the natives who would not submit were driven out of the German
settlements, so within their boundaries the germs of Christianity,
which had already spread in the island, were as good as annihilated.
Among the victorious Germans the Northern heathenism existed in full
strength. In many names of places, at the water-springs, the
watersheds, in the designations of the days of the week, the