Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/22

 World, may be traced to the spark left burning upon our shores by these northern barbarians.

Our English writers and readers direct their attention too exclusively to the Anglo-Saxon branch of this great Teutonic race of people, and scarcely acknowledge the social influence of the admixture of their Danish conquerors,—of that fresh infusion in the 10th century, from the same original stock, of the original spirit, character, and social institutions. The schoolman and the political antiquary find it classical or scholarlike to trace up to obscure intimations, in the treatise of Tacitus on the ancient Germans, the origin of parliaments, trial by jury, and all other free institutions, assuming somewhat gratuitously that the seafaring Saxons, who, four hundred years after the days of Tacitus, crossed the sea from the countries north of the Elbe, and conquered England, were identical in laws and social institutions with the forest Germans on the Rhine whom Tacitus describes; and forgetting that a much nearer and more natural source of all the social elements they are tracing back to the forests of Germany in the time of Agricola, was to be found in full vigour among the people who had conquered and colonised the kingdoms of Northumberland and East Anglia, reckoned equal then to one third of England, and had held them for several generations, and who conquered and ruled over all England for nearly half a century immediately previous to its final conquest by their own Norman kinsmen. The spirit, character, and national vigour of the old Anglo-Saxon branch of this people, had evidently become extinct under the influence and pressure of the church of Rome upon the energies of the human mind. This abject state of the mass of the old Christianised Anglo-Saxons, is evident from the trifling resistance they made to the small piratical bands of Danes or Northmen who infested and settled on their coasts. It is evident