Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/280

Rh 268 ENGLAND [HISTOKV. Angles, Saxous, and Jutes. Native and foreign names of the united nation. First at tempts at settle ment. as the High-Dutch, perhaps older. These dialects, which in their system of letter-changes agree with the ancient Gothic and the Scandinavian rather than with the High- Dutch, form the natural speech of the whole coast region stretching from Picardy to Denmark, and they have been carried by conquest far to the east, along the Slavonic, Prussian, and Finnish coasts of the Baltic. But their area has been encroached on in different parts by French, by Danish, and by High-Dutch, so that that form of the Low- Dutch which is spoken in the kingdom of the Netherlands, and which we now know specially as Dutch, is the only con tinental dialect of the whole group which is commonly acknowledged as a national and literary language. Among the tribes of this region, three stand out conspicuously in the history of that conquest, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. 1 Each had its special and marked share in the work. The Jutes, in all likelihood, formed the first permanent Teutonic settlement in Britain. The Saxons and the Angles settled later ; but each of them occupied a far larger part of the island than the Jutes. And each of these last gave a name to the Teutonic settlements as a whole. As soon as the Teutonic settlers were so far united as to bear a common name, the received name on their own lips was English; on the lips of their Celtic neighbours and enemies the received name was Saxon. The reason for this difference in nomenclature is plain. The Angles occupied a greater share of the land than the Saxons ; they therefore gave the national name to the united people. 2 But the Saxons were the first among the invaders with whom the Celtic or Roman inhabitants of Britain had to deal ; they therefore gave the Saxon name to the in vaders in general. This last fact at once brings us to the actual history of the English conquest. If we cannot say that the English conquest itself began, we may at least say that the first steps towards it were taken, as soon as any Low- Dutch invaders from beyond sea first attempted a settlement by arms in Roman, or once Roman, Britain. This process, it must be marked, stands wholly apart from questions either as to the possible Teutonic origin of any of the tribes whom the Romans found in Britain, or as to possible Teutonic settlements in the province made with the sanction of the Roman authorities. This last process undoubtedly happened in the case of soldiers of Teutonic race serving in the Roman armies. Bat Teutonic settlements, either before the Roman occupation or under the Roman occupa tion, are something wholly distinct from the Teutonic con quest either of a Roman province or of a land forsaken by Rome. Such settlements might make the Teutonic con quest more easy when it did come, but that is all that they could do. Settlers of either of those classes became Roman silbjects, Roman provincials. The events which led to the Conquest began when men of Teutonic race first settled or tried te settle in the island, not as Roman soldiers or Roman subjects, but as foreign invaders of the Roman land. This work, which was not the English conquest, but which was the first step towards it, the conquest which was merely attempted and not carried out, seems to have begun in the second half of the fourth century. Claudian bears witness to the naval victories of the elder Theodosius, the father of the renowned emperor of that name, who (367 A.D.) beat 1 The Angles and the Saxons are plain enough; there is a certain degree of mystery about the Jutes, their name, and their origin. But it is enough for our purpose that they were a third Teutonic people, distinguishable from the Angles and Saxons. 2 Enyle, Anyelcyn, Angli, are the usual names of the united nation. Angli-Saxones, Angul-Seaxe, are sometimes found, especially in the royal style of the tenth century. Those forms are equivalent to A ngli et Saxones, the nation formed by the union of the Angles and Saxons. It is therefore the more correct description of the two ; but its employ ment in England is always formal ; it clearly never passed into general use. In foreign writers it is somewhat more common. back a Saxon invasion by sea. That is to say, an attempt at Teutonic settlement was then made: but there was still strength in the Roman power to hinder it. Had it been otherwise, the history of English conquest in Britain would have begun in the fourth centuiy instead of in the fifth. Incursions undoubtedly went on; the south-eastern coast of Britain, the part specially exposed to Saxon invasion, got the name of the Saxon Shore? and a Roman officer with the 1 he title of Count had that shore under his special keepin But things took quite a new turn after the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain. The land now lay open to settlement in a way in which it had not done before. It is now therefore that actual conquests, as distinguished from mere incursions and attempted settlements, begin. Our materials for the history of this great event, an event Notice which is nothing short of the beginning of our national of tlie history, at first sight seem scanty. Our only absolutely conciu contemporary notice is to be found in two meagre entries in the chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, which however assert the main fact that Britain was brought under the power of the Saxons about the middle of the fifth century. 4 The native writer who is most nearly contemporary, the Briton Gildas, belongs to the next century, and was a witness of some stages, though not of the earliest, of the work of con quest. He is the earliest writer who gives us anything that can be called a narrative, a narrative meagre enough, but which helps us to some particular events and personal names. About the same time Procopius, without any direct notice of the conquest, speaks of Britain as a land inhabited by Angles and Frisians as well as Britons. The series of English writers begins with Breda, and goes on with the English Chronicles, to which wo may fairly add the fragments of ancient English songs which lurk in the Latin of Henry of Huntingdon. Of these Bceda himself did not write till more than two hundred years after the beginning of the Conquest, and the materials for his short narrative of the Conquest itself seems to come at least as much from British as from English sources. Our only details are those which are preserved in the Chronicles and in Henry of Huntingdon. The Chronicles in their present form do not date from an earlier tims than the reign of ^Elfred in the ninth century ; but any one who studies them carefully will see that this part of the record contains far older materials. The narrative is remarkably free from anything which has a legendary sound. That its chronology may be largely arbitrary is possible ; but that it is so is of itself an arbitrary conjecture. The English at the time of their landing were not wholly illiterate. They had their runic alphabet, and it is perfectly possible that the entries in the Chronicles may come from an absolutely contemporary record. Such a record, even if it marked the sequence of years according to some reckoning of its own, must of course have been adapted to the Christian reckoning by the com pilers of the Chronicles, and in such a process some errors of detail may well have crept in. But there seems no reason to suspect invention, falsification, or even accidental error, on any great scale. The narrative will bear testing ; the entries fit in with all that can be made out from an examination of the country. They fit in with the notices of the Welsh writers, and with all such 3 The Limes Saxonicus or Littus Saxonicum was iirst truly explained by Dr Guest. It means, not a shore occupied by Saxons, but a boun dary against Saxons. It answers to the Danish, Slavonic, and Spanish marches of the later empire, except that in the one case the enemy was to be dreaded by laud, and in the other case by sea. 4 Prosper has two entries. The former says that &quot; Hue tempestate (the time of Constantino the Tyrant, 407-411) prse valitudine Rom- anorum, vires funditus attenuates Britanniee.&quot; The other says that, some time before the death of Ae tius in 454, &quot; Britannia?, usque ad hoc tempus variis cladibus eventibusque lacerates, in ditionem Saxonum redisuntur.&quot;