local ealdormen and the village gentry.

Marriages were practically conducted by purchase, the wife being bought
by the husband from her father's family. A relic of this custom perhaps
still survives in the modern ceremony, when the father gives the bride
in marriage to the bridegroom. Polygamy was not unknown; and it was
usual for men to marry their father's widows. The wives, being part of
the father's property, naturally became part of the son's heritage.
Fathers probably possessed the right of selling their children into
slavery; and we know that English slaves were sold at Rome, being
conveyed thither by Frisian merchants.

The artizan class, such as it was, must have been attached to the houses
of the chieftains, probably in a servile position. Pottery was
manufactured of excellent but simple patterns. Metal work was, of
course, thoroughly understood, and the Anglo-Saxon swords and knives
discovered in barrows are of good construction. Every chief had also his
minstrel, who sang the short and jerky Anglo-Saxon songs to the
accompaniment of a harp. The dead were burnt and their ashes placed in
tumuli in the north: the southern tribes buried their warriors in full
military dress, and from their tombs much of the little knowledge which
we possess as to their habits is derived. Thence have been taken their
swords, a yard long, with ornamental hilt and double-cutting edge, often
covered by runic inscriptions; their small girdle knives; their long
spears; and their round, leather-faced, wooden shields. The jewellery is
of gold, enriched with coloured enamel, pearl, or sliced garnet.
Buckles, rings, bracelets, hairpins, necklaces, scissors, and toilet
requisites were also buried with the dead. Glass drinking-cups which
occur amongst the tombs, were probably imported from the continent to
Kent or London; and some small trade certainly existed with the Roman
world, as we learn from Baeda.

In faith the English remained true to their old Teutonic myths. Their
intercourse with the Christian Welsh was not of a kind to make them
embrace the religion which must have seemed to them that of slaves and
enemies. Baeda tells us that the English worshipped idols, and sacrificed
oxen to their gods. Many traces of their mythology are still left in our
midst.

First in importance among their deities came Woden, the Odin of our
Scandinavian kinsmen, whose name we still preserve in Wednesday (dies
Mercurii). To him every royal family