THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND. BOOK I. THE ORIGINAL SETTLEMENT OF THE ANGLO-SAXON COMMONWEALTH. CHAPTER I. SAXON AND WELSH TRADITIONS. ELEVEN centuries ago, an industrious and conscientious historian, desiring to give a record of the establishment of his forefathers in this island, could find no fuller or better account than this: "About the year of Grace 445-446, the British inhabitants of England, deserted by the Roman masters who had enervated while they protected them, and exposed to the ravages of Picts and Scots from the extreme and barbarous portions of the island, called in the assistance of heathen Saxons from the continent of Europe. The strangers faithfully performed their task, and chastised the Northern invaders; then, in scorn of the weakness of their employers, subjected them in turn to the yoke, and after various vicissitudes of fortune, established their own VOL. I. B power upon the ruins of Roman and British civilization." The few details which had reached the historian taught that the strangers were under the guidance of two brothers, Hengest and Hors: that their armament was conveyed in three ships or keels that it consisted of Jutes, Saxons and Angles that their successes stimulated similar adventurers among their countrymen: and that in process of time their continued migrations were so large and numerous, as to have reduced Anglia, their original home, to a desert'. Such was the tale of the victorious Saxons in the eighth century at a later period, the vanquished Britons found a melancholy satisfaction in adding details which might brand the career of their conquerors with the stain of disloyalty. According to these hostile authorities, treachery and fraud prepared and consolidated the Saxon triumph. The wiles of Hengest's beautiful daughter subdued the mind of the British ruler; a murderous violation of the rights of hospitality, which cut off the chieftains of the Britons at the very table of their hosts, delivered over the defenceless land to the barbarous invader; and the miraculous intervention of 1 Beda, Hist. Eccl. i. 14, 15. Gildas, Hist. § 14. Nennius, Hist. § 38. 2 It is uncertain from the MSS. whether this lady is to be called Rouwen or Ronwen. The usual English tradition gives her name as Rowena; if this be accurate, I presume our pagan forefathers knew something of a divine personage-Hróðwén-possibly a dialectical form of the great and glorious goddess Hréde; for whom refer to Chapter X. of this Book. 3 The story of the treacherous murder perpetrated upon the Welsh chieftains does not claim an English origin. It is related of the Oldsaxons upon the continent, in connexion with the conquest of the Thuringians. See Widukind. Germanus, the spells of Merlin and the prowess of Arthur, or the victorious career of Aurelius Ambrosius, although they delayed and in part avenged, yet could not prevent the downfal of their people'. Meagre indeed are the accounts which thus satisfied the most enquiring of our forefathers; yet such as they are, they were received as the undoubted truth, and appealed to in later periods as the earliest authentic record of our race. The acuter criticism of an age less prone to believe, more skilful in the appreciation of evidence, and familiar with the fleeting forms of mythical and epical thought, sees in them only a confused mass of traditions borrowed from the most heterogeneous sources, compacted rudely and with little ingenuity, and in which the smallest possible amount of historical truth is involved in a great deal of fable. Yet the truth which such traditions do nevertheless contain, yields to the alchemy of our days a golden harvest: if we cannot undoubtingly accept the details of such legends, they still point out to us at least the course we must pursue to discover the elements of fact upon which the Mythus and Epos rest, and guide us to the period and the locality where these took root and flourished. From times beyond the records of history, it is certain that continual changes were taking place in the position and condition of the various tribes that peopled the northern districts of Europe. Into this great basin the successive waves of Keltic, Teutonic 1 Conf. Nennius, Hist. 37 seq. 46 seq. Beda, Hist. Ecc. i. 14, 15. Gildas, Hist. § 25. |