Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/101

Rh is clear that the Rugians must have been of that race. Some of the nations mentioned by Tacitus were, he says, of non-Germanic origin. Rügen Island was the chief place of worship for the Wendish race, the chief centre of their religion. On the east side of the peninsula of Jasmund in Rügen are the white chalk cliffs of Stubbenkammer, and on the north side of the island is the promontory of Arcona, where in the twelfth century we read of the idol Svantovit, and the temple of this Wendish god. No traces of Teutonic worship have ever been found in Rügen. They are all Slavonic. Saxo tells us at the worship of Svantovit at Arcana with the tributes brought there from all Slavonia.

The probability of some very early settlers in Britain having been Wends, and consequently that there was a Slavic element in the origin of the Old English race, is shown in another way. The settlement of large bodies of Vandals in Britain by order of the Emperor Probus is a fact recorded in Roman history. The authority is Zosimus, and this settlement is said to have taken place in the latter part of the third century of our era, after a great defeat of Vandals near the Lower Rhine. They were accompanied by a horde of Burgundians, and as they were apparently on the march in search of new homes, it probably suited them as well as it suited the Romans to be transported to Britain. Unless it can be shown that the Vandal name is to be understood to mean only certain tribes of Teutonic origin, this arbitrary settlement of Vandals in Britain is the earliest record of immigrants of Slavic origin. It is not possible to ascertain the parts of the country in which they settled, but as they were known to Roman writers by the names Vinidæ and Venedi, it is possible that the Roman place-names in Britain—Vindogladia in Dorset, Vindomis in Hampshire, and others—may have been