. And this
form is current amongst the scholars of the present time; who call the
language of the _Heliand_, of the so-called _Carolinian Psalms_ and of
_Hildebrant and Hathubrant_, the _Old_-Saxon, in contradistinction to
the _Anglo_-Saxon of Alfred, Caedmon, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The
authority of the Anglo-Saxons themselves justifies this compound; yet it
is by no means unexceptionable. Many a writer has acquiesced in the
notion that the Old-Saxon was neither more nor less than the Anglo-Saxon
in a continental locality, and the Anglo-Saxon but the Old-Saxon
transplanted into England. Again--the Old-Saxons have been considered as
men who struck, as with a two-edged sword, at Britain on the one side,
and at Upper Saxony on the other, so that the Saxons of Leipsic and the
Saxons of London are common daughters of one parent--the Saxons of
Westphalia.

The exact relations, however, to the Old-Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons
seem to have been as follows:--

The so-called Old-Saxon is the old _Westphalian_--

The so-called Anglo-Saxon the old _Hanoverian_ population.

Their languages were sufficient alike to be mutually intelligible, and
after the conversion of the Angles of England, who became Christianized
about A.D. 600, the extension of their own creed to the still Pagan
Saxons of the Continent became one of the great duties to the bishops
and missionaries of Britain; who, although themselves of Hanoverian
rather than Westphalian extraction, looked upon the whole stock at large
as their parentage, and called their cousins (so to say) in Westphalia,
and their brothers in Hanover, by the collective term _Old-Saxon_.

All the Angles, then, of the _Saxonia_ of the Frank and British writers
of the eighth century were Saxon, though all the Saxons were not Angle.

Eastphalia, the division which must have been the most _Angle_, reached
as far as the Elbe.

But there was, also, a Saxony beyond Eastphalia, a Saxony beyond the
Elbe; the country of the _Saxones Transalbiani_; other names for its
occupants being _Nord-albingi_ (=_men to the north of the Elbe_), and
Nord-leudi (=_North people_). The poet already quoted, writes--

Saxonum populus quidam, quos claudit ab Austro
Albis sejunctim positos Aquilonis ad axem.
Hos _Nordalbingos_ patrio sermone vocamus.

In this case as before, _Saxon_ is a generic rather than a particular
name. The facts that prove this give us also the geographical position
of the