English settlement extended
from the Forth to Essex, and was subdivided into Bernicia, Deira, and
East Anglia.

Wherever the Anglo-Saxons came, their first work was to stamp out with
fire and sword every trace of the Roman civilisation. Modern
investigations amongst pagan Anglo-Saxon barrows in Britain show the Low
German race as pure barbarians, great at destruction, but incapable of
constructive work. Professor Rolleston, who has opened several of these
early heathen tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhere
abundant evidence of "their great aptness at destroying, and their great
slowness in elaborating, material civilisation." Until the Anglo-Saxon
received from the Continent the Christian religion and the Roman
culture, he was a mere average Aryan barbarian, with a strong taste for
war and plunder, but with small love for any of the arts of peace.
Wherever else, in Gaul, Spain, or Italy, the Teutonic barbarians came in
contact with the Roman civilisation, they received the religion of
Christ, and the arts of the conquered people, during or before their
conquest of the country. But in Britain the Teutonic invaders remained
pagans long after their settlement in the island; and they utterly
destroyed, in the south-eastern tract, almost every relic of the Roman
rule and of the Christian faith. Hence we have here the curious fact
that, during the fifth and sixth centuries, a belt of intrusive and
aggressive heathendom intervenes between the Christians of the Continent
and the Christian Welsh and Irish of western Britain. The Church of the
Celtic Welsh was cut off for more than a hundred years from the Churches
of the Roman world by a hostile and impassable barrier of heathen
English, Jutes, and Saxons. Their separation produced many momentous
effects on the after history both of the Welsh themselves and of their
English conquerors.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST.

Though the myths which surround the arrival of the English in Britain
have little historical value, they are yet interesting for the light
which they throw incidentally upon the habits and modes of thought of
the colonists. They have one character in common with all other legends,
that they grow fuller and more circumstantial the further they proceed
from the original time. Baeda, who wrote about A.D. 700, gives them in a
very meagre form: the English Chronicle, compiled at the court of
AElfred, about A.D. 900, adds sev