most
part in the same lands which it has held ever since the date of the
early Germanic immigration.

The Low Germans, in the third century after Christ, occupied in the main
the belt of flat country between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine.
Between them and the old High German Swabians lay a race intermediate in
tongue and blood, the Franks. The Low Germans were divided, like most
other barbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes,
whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the few
authorities which remain to us. We must not expect to find among them
the definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather such a
vagueness as that which characterised the loose confederacies of North
American Indians or the various shifting peoples of South Africa. But
there are three of their tribes which stand fairly well marked off from
one another in early history, and which bore, at least, the chief share
in the colonisation of Britain. These three tribes are the Jutes, the
English, and the Saxons. Closely connected with them, but less strictly
bound in the same family tie, were the Frisians.

The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, lived in the marshy
forests and along the winding fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula
of Denmark, which still preserves their name in our own day. The English
dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad neck of the peninsula, which
we now call Sleswick. And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the
flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to that of the Rhine.
At the period when history lifts the curtain upon the future Germanic
colonists of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of the
low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North Sea, and closely
connected with other tribes on either side, such as the Frisians and the
Danes, who still speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian
languages.

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the relationship between
the first Teutonic settlers in Britain and their continental brethren.
Not only are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly connected
with the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in the
colonisation of the island at all; and more closely connected with the
Frisians, some of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical
hordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a later date in all
the northern counties: but they are also most clo