Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/78

64 police-ruled developments, is only a house built upon the sand.’

The Northern dialects, as introduced into England from the fifth and tenth centuries, may have differed, in some respects, from the Icelandic or Old Northern tongue as written in the eleventh century. Hence the great value of the earliest runic inscriptions as evidence, so far as they go, of the earliest meanings of some words that afterwards were used in Old English. In considering this probable change, Stephens tells us that the only corruptors of dialects he knew were those ‘who improve Nature, by writing them not as they are, but according to their nations of what they ought to be—i.e., in accordance with rules of grammar derived from other languages—for instance, the peculiar and comparatively modern Icelandic, with which they may be acquainted.’

As the name Northmen was a general one, which included the different tribal people of Scandinavia, so the name Eastman appears to have also been a general name for the people of the Baltic region on the opposite shores to those of Sweden. With the Angles and Goths of the early period of the Anglo-Saxon settlement some people of the Norse race, afterwards so called, may well have been included. The earliest English coins found in Norway are of the period when the Norse began their Viking expeditions to the British shores. They comprise coins of Kewulf of Mercia, 796-819, Ceolwulf his son, 819-821, and Northumbrian coins of about 803-840.

From the results of the researches of many archæologists, historians, and philologists, both English and Scandinavian, we are led to the conclusion that the Northmen of various tribes and nations had a greater share in the settlement of England than has commonly