anglo saxon britain origin of the english

8/8/2019 Anglo Saxon Britain Origin of the English

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ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

CHAPTER 1.THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH .

AT a period earlier than the dawn of written historythere lived somewhere among the great table-landsand plains of Central Asia a race known to us onlyby the uncertain name of Aryans. These Aryans werea fair-skinned and well-built people, long past thestage of aboriginal savagery, and possessed of a considerable degree of primitive culture. Though mainlypastoral in habit, they were acquainted with tillage,and they grew for themselves at least one kind ofcereal grain. They spoke a language whose existenceand nature we infer from the remnants of it whichsurvive in the tongues of their descendants, and fromthese remnants we are able to judge, in some measure,of their civilisation and their modes of thought. Theindications thus preserved for us show the Aryans tohave been a simple and fierce community of earlywarriors, farmers, and shepherds, still in a partiallynomad condition, living under a patriarchal rule, originally ignorant of all metals save gold, but possessing

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2 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

weapons and implements of stone,l and worshipping astheir chief god the open heaven. We must not regardthem as an idyllic and peaceable people: on the contrary, they were the fiercest and most conquering tribeever known. In mental power and in plasticity ofmanners, however, they probably rose far su\."erior toany race then living, except only the Semitic nationsof the Mediterranean coast. .

From the common Central Asian home, coloniesof warlike Aryans gradually dispersed themselves, stillin the pre-historic period, under pressure of populationor hostile invasion, over many districts of Europe andAsia. Some of them moved southward, across thepasses of Afghanistan, and occupied the fertile plainsof the Indus and the Ganges, where they became theancestors of the Brahmans and other modern highcaste Hindoos. The language which they took withthem to their new settlements beyond the Himalayaswas the Sanskrit, which still remains to this day thenearest of all dialects that we now possess to theprimitive Aryan speech. From it are derived the chiefmodern tongues of northern India, from the Vindhyasto the Hindu Kush. Other Aryan . tribes settled inthe mountain districts west of Hindustan; and yetothers found themselves a home in the hills of Iranor Persia, where they still preserve an allied dialectof the ancient mother tongue.

1 Professor Boyd Dawkins has shown that the ContinentalCelts were still in their stone age when they invaded Europe;whence we must conclude that the original Aryans wereunacquainted with the use of bronze.


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i 'HE OR IGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 3But the mass of the emigrants from the CentralAsian fatherland moved further westward in successivewaves, and occupied, one after another, the midlandplains and mountainous peninsulas of Europe. Firstof all, apparently, came the Celts, who spreadslowly across the South of Russia and Germany, and

who are found at the dawn of authentic history ex tending over the entire western coasts and islands of thecontinent, from Spain to Scotland. Mingled in manyplaces with the still earlier non-Aryan aboriginesperhaps Iberians and Euskarians, a short and swarthyrace, armed only with weapons of polished stone, andrepresented at the present day by the Basques of thePyrenees and the Asturias-the Celts held rule inSpain, Gaul, and Britain, up to the date of the severalRoman conquests. A second great wave of Aryanimmigration, that of the Hellenic and Italian races,broke over the shores of the lEgean and the Adriatic,where their cognate languages have become familiarto us in the two extreme and typical forms of theclassical Greek and Latin. A third wave was that ofthe Teutonic or German people, who followed anddrove out the Celts over a large part of central andwestern Europe; while a foureh and final swarm wasthat of the Slavonic tribes, which still inhabit only theextreme eastern portion of the continent.

With the Slavonians we shall have nothing to do inthis enquiry; and with the Greek and Italian raceswe need only deal very incidentally. But the Celts,whom the English invaders found in possession of allBritain when they began their settlements in the

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4 ANGLO-SAXON IlRITAIN.island, form the subject of anotht;r volume in thisseries, and will necessarily call for some small portionof our attention here also j while it is to the Germanicrace that the English stock itself actually belongs, sothat we must examine somewhat more closely thecourse of Germanic immigration through Europe, andthe nature of the primitive Teutonic civilisation.

The Germanic family of peoples consisted of a racewhich early split up into two great hordes or stocks,speaking dialects which differed slightly from oneanother through the action of the various circum-stances to which they were each exposed These twostocks are the High German and the Low German(with which last may be included the Gothic and theScandinavian). Moving across Europe from east towest, they slowly drove out the Celts from Germanyand the central plains, and took possession of thewhole district between the Alps, the Rhine, and theBaltic, which formed their limits at the period whenthey first came into coiltact with the Roman power.The Goths, living in closest proximity to the empire,fell upon it during the decline and decay of Rome,settled in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and becomingabsorbed in the mass of the native population, dis-appear altogether from history as a distinguishablenationality. But the High and Low Germans retainto the present day their distinctive language andfeatures j and the latter branch, to which the Englishpeople belong, still lives for the most part in the samelands which it has held ever since the date of theearly Germanic immigration.


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THE OlRGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 5The Low Germans, in the th ird century afterChrist, occupied in the main the belt of flat country

between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine.Betweenthem andtheoldH ighGermanSwabianslaya race interl1!ediate in tongue andblood, the Franks.TheLow Germans were divided, like most o therbarbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-markedtribes, whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably usedby the few authorities which remainto us . We must not expect to find among them thedefiniteness of modern civilised nations, but rathersuch a vagueness as tha t which characterised theloose confederacies of North American Indians orthe various shifting peoples of South Africa. Butthere are three oftheir tribes which stand fairly wellmarked off from one another in early history, andwhich bore, at least the chief share in the colonisation o f Britain. These three tribes are the Jutes,the English,and the Saxons. Closely connected withthem, but less strictly bound in the same family tie,were theFrisians.TheJutes, the northernmost o fthe three divisions,lived in the marshy forests and along the windingfiords o fJutland, the extreme peninsulaofDenmark,which still preserves their name in our own day.,TheEnglish dwelt justto the south, in the heath-cladneck of the peninsula, which we now call Sleswick.And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied theflat continental shore, from the mouth ofthe Oder tothat o f the Rhine. At the period when history liftsthe curtain upon the future Germanic colonists of


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6 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants ofthe low-lying lands around the Baltic and the NorthSea, and closely connected with other tribes on eitherside, such as the Frisians and the Danes, who stillspeak very cognate Low German and Scandinavianlanguages.

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of therelationship between the first Teutonic settlers inBritain and their continental brethren. Not only arethe true Englishmen of modern England distantlyconnected with the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in the colonisation of the island at all;and more closely connected with the Frisians, someof whom probably accompanied the earliest piraticalhordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at alater date in all the northern counties: but they arealso most closely connected of all with those membersof the colonising tribes who did not themselves beara share in the settlement, and whose descendantsIre still living in Denmark and in various parts ofGermany. The English proper, it is true, seem tohave deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body;50 that, according to Breda, the Christian historian)f Northumberland, in his time this oldest Englandby the shores of the Baltic lay waste and unpeopled,through the completeness of the exodus. But theJutes appear to have migrated in small numbers,while the larger part of the tribe remained at homein their native marshland; and of the more numerousSaxons, though a great swarm went out to conquersouthern Britain, a vast body was still left behind


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THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH. 7in Germany, where it continued independent andpagan till the time of Karl the Great, long afterthe Teutonic colonists of Britain had grown intopeaceable and civilised Christians. I t is from thestatements of later historians with regard to thesecontinental Saxons that our knowledge of the earlyEnglish customs and institutions, during the con-tinental period of English history, must be mainlyinferred. We gather our picture of the English andSaxons who first came to this country from the picturedrawn for us of those among their brethren whomthey left behind in the primitive English home.

These three tribes, the Jutes, the English, and theSaxons, had not yet, apparently, advanced far enoughin the idea of national unity to possess a separategeneral name, distinguishing them altogether from theother tribes of the Germanic stock. Most probablythey did not regard themselves at this period as asingle nation at all, or even as more closely bound toone another than to the surrounding and kindredtribes. They may have united at times for purposesof a special war; but their union was merely analo-gous to that of two North American peoples, or twomodern European nations, pursuing a common policyfor awhile. At a later date, in Britain, the threetribes learned to call themselves collectively by thename of that one among them which earliest rose tosupremacy-the English; and the whole southernhalf of the island came to be known by their nameas England. Even from the first it seems probablethat their language was spoken ot as English only,


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8 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN."and comparatively little as Saxon. But since it wouldbe inconvenient to use the name of one dominanttribe alone, the English, as equivalent to those of thethree, and since it is desirable tc? have a commontitle for all the Germanic colonists of Britain, whenever it is necessary to speak of them together, weshall employ the late and, strictly speaking, incorrectform of " Anglo-Saxons" for this purpose. Similarly,in order to distinguish the earliest pure form of theEnglish language from its later modern form, nowlargely enriched and altered by the addition ofRomance or Latin words and the disuse of nativeones, we shall always speak of it, where distinction isnecessary, as Anglo-Saxon. The term is now toodeeply rooted in our language to be again uprooted;and it has, besides, the merit of supplying a want.At the same time, it should be remembered that theexpression Anglo-Saxon is purely artificial, and wasnever used by the people themselves in describing:heir fellows or their tongue. When they did notspeak of themselves as Jutes, English, and Saxonsrespectiveiy, they spoke of themselves as Englishalone.

anglo saxon britain origin of the english

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