Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/170

156 confirm this, even had we no history to which to turn. Our map shows at a glance an island where once all the names of natural features of the landscape and of towns as well were Celtic. This primitive layer of names has been rolled back by pressure from the direction of the mainland. It is a unit opposed to the combined aggression of the Germanic tongues.

The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons set the Teutonic ball a-rolling. They came from the northern coast of Germany, from the marshes and low-lying country of Friesland. These barbarians seem to have followed close upon the heels of the retiring Romans, making their appearance about the year 400 of our era. The whole island lay open to them, and they made haste to overrun the best of it. They avoided the fens and forests, to which the natives withdrew. Within two hundred years their influence had extended even to the uttermost parts of Ireland, over the whole of which, as our map shows, Saxon village names sporadically occur. The main center of their occupation was in the southeast and middle of England, where, from their first landings in Kent and Essex, they transformed the entire country. Scotland also, south of Edinburgh, was infused with Saxon blood if we may judge from our map. This district, from the river Tees to the Forth, is in fact, as Taylor says, as purely English as any part of the island. The Lothians were reputed English soil until the eleventh century. Scotland begins racially not at the political boundary of the river Tweed and Solway Firth, but at the base of the Grampian Hills. The correspondence of a map of physical geography and of Celtic place names in Scotland shows a relation of cause and effect.

This first inoculation with Teutonic blood was an unwilling one. We have every evidence that the struggle was bitter to the end. The tale of Saint Guthlac, a devout Briton, shows it. Disturbed in his meditations one night by a great uproar outside his hermit hut, he engaged himself in prayer for preservation until the morning. The chronicler tells us that he was much relieved at daybreak by the discovery that the midnight marauders were only devils and not Saxons. So strong was the race antipathy that the laws forbade a Briton from drinking from a cup touched by a Saxon till it had been scoured with sand or ashes. Two hundred years of such a struggle could not but modify the purity of the native stock, as we shall be able to prove.

About the year 850 came the second installment of the Teutonic invasion at the hands of the Danes. They put an end to the inroads of their Saxon predecessors by attacking them in the rear. Two contrasted kinds of expeditions seem to have been dispatched against the island. Those which besieged London and skirted the southern