Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/281

Rh ENGLISH AND WEL.SU.] ENGLAND 269 incidental sources of knowledge as we have. In this way a narrative in considerable detail has been recovered by the care and skill of Dr Guest. As for the notices in Henry of Huntingdon, which evidently contain fragments of lost poems, we must remember that a contemporary poem may be just as good an authority as a prose writing. Several poems are inserted in the Chronicles themselves in undoubtedly historical times, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Other poems of those ages, sometimes, like the song of Maldon, preserved in the original, sometimes, like the song of Stamfordbridge and the song of Waltheof at York, preserved only in Latin fragments, are among our best materials for military events. They go far more into detail than the prose writers do. There seems then no good ground for doubting the general trustworthiness of the narrative which is preserved to us in the Chronicles, and which we are occasionally able to enlarge from other sources. It is, of course, only the earlier stages of the Conquest that can be made the subject of any controversy at all. From the beginning of the conversion of the English to Christianity, we begin to have contemporary materials of one kind or another, till, in the time of Alfred, the Chronicle itself becomes contemporary. It is only for about a hundred and fifty years that we are left almost wholly to judge of our materials by their internal evidence. And surely a narrative like that of the Chronicles, no tissue of wild and impossible legends, but a steady business like series of entries, may very well have been handed down for that length of time by means of runes, helped here and there by a contemporary song. settle- Our narrative then, put together from these various ment of sources, represents the Britons, after the departure of the the Jutes R omail legions, as left without defence against the attacks of their northern neighbours the Picts and Scots. They apply for help to Aetius ; but the Roman general, busy in the struggle with Attila, has no leisure to do anything for them. Their prince, who bears a name of Inch the most familiar form is Vortigern, invites the help of the Saxons, an unwise step enough, but one which has plenty of parallels in history. The British prince, in the most authentic record, is not a king but a duke. The Teutonic leaders whom he invites are also ealdormen or keretoyan, not kings. They are the two brothers Hengest and Horsa. Their landing is fixed by the Chronicle to the year 449 ; and, without insisting on this exact date, it is plain that the Conquest must have begun about the middle of the fifth century. A warfare of nearly forty years, in which many battles are entered, established the first Teutonic kingdom in Britain, that of Kent, the one land which never lost its British name. Of the tvo brother leaders, Horsa is killed in a battle with Vortigern in 455, after which Hengest and his son yEsc assume the kingly title. In all this there is nothing like romance ; it is a matter-of-fact kind of history, which might be preserved by a runic chronicle, which might almost be preserved by tradition. Once only we have a touch which seems to come from a song, as when in a battle in the year 473 the Welsh are said to have &quot;fled from the English like fire.&quot; The geography of the story has been minutely examined, and it shows that the tale is a sound and credible military narrative. Later writers, English and British, have tricked out the story with endless mythical details, and -have carried the arms of Hengest far beyond the narrow limits of Kent, to which the Chronicle confines them. Modern critics have found materials for cavil in the names of the two brothers, and in the number of the thirty-nine years of the reign of Hengi-st. Both points might easily be given up. The main fact is the gradual conquest of a small corner of Britain after much hard fighting with its British possessors. But there really seems no reason why Hengest and Horsa might not be names of real men as much as Wulf, Beorn, and Leo. And the years of Hengest s reign are, after all, one short of the mystical forty. In the British narrative, in the single Roman entry, of Use of these events, the Teutonic invaders are called Saxons. In the the Chronicles they appear as Angelcyn, Angle, Enr/le, Sa f&quot; Angles or English. They are so called, not merely in the * t ^ historical summary of the ninth century editor, but in the uame. entry (473) which has the earliest ring of all about it. But when Boeda, and after him the Chronicler, gives a short ethnological account of the invaders, they describe the Teutonic conquerors of Kent neither as Saxons nor as Angles, but as Jutes. As the Jutes then, in the very re cord of their conquest, are spoken of, on the one hand as Saxons, on the other hand as English, it seems to follow that, from the very beginning, the Celtic inhabitants of Britain called all Teutonic invaders Saxons, while the in vaders themselves from the very beginning used Angle or English as their common name. The general use of the Saxon name by the Celts is only what we should have looked for ; the wide use of the English name among the Teutons themselves is a fact to be noticed. It is at least certain that, while the English name is often applied to Saxons and Jutes, it would be hard to find any case where an Angle calls himself, or is called in his own tongue, a Saxon. We need not infer that the English name had become the common name of all the three tribes before they left Germany ; it certainly .became so within no long time after they settled in Britain. We also see that, from the beginning, the Teutonic con- The querors spoke of their Britisli enemies as Welsh or Welsh strangers. The name is familiar in that sense both in uanie - Britain and on the mainland, but it seems never to be applied to any strangers but those who were either of Roman or of Celtic speech. And it would seem to be applied only to those Celts who had come under the Roman dominion. Our forefathers spoke of the Bretivealas in Britain, of the Galwcalas in Gaul, of the Rumu calas in Italy ; but the name seems never to be applied to the Scots either in Ireland or in Britain. Like the word Slave, it sank, in the language of the conquerors, to express bondage. The masculine ural/t sometimes, the feminine ivylne much more commonly, mean a slave in the secondary meaning of that word. This difference of usage is again remarkable. It falls in with the belief, natural in itself, that in the process of conquest the few Britons who were spared were mainly women. Again, Btoda and the Chronicler, as we have seen, speak of the Teutonic conquerors of Britain as sprung from three tribes only, the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. It was plainly only those three tribes, that is, chiefs of those tribes, who founded kingdoms in Britain. But in all great migra tions various kindred tribes are sure to take a part, and it Question would be rash to rule that no Low-Dutch people but those of other three took a part in the enterprise. Procopius, for instance, T e&quot; toilic speaks, not of Angles and Saxons, but of Angles and ri Frisians. We may well believe that Frisians, and other tribes too, helped in the work. Possibly no one settlement consisted wholly of men of any one tribe. It is enough that all the royal races of the several kingdoms belonged to the three stocks, Saxon, Anglian, and Jutish. It was then by Saxon, Anglian, and Jutish settlers, or at all events by settlers under Saxon, Anglian, and Jutish leaders, that the greater part of Britain was changed into England. But the work was a slow one, and the way in which it was carried out seems not to have been exactly the same in all parts. In the end seven or eight chief kingdoms were Growth founded. The old dream of a regular Heptarchy has long seven been exploded ; but it is certain that, among a crowd ui ^f smaller states, seven or eight stand out as conspicuous king- among the rest, arid as having something like a continuous doms.