Anglo-Saxons and Jutes

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes differed in many important particulars from the other tribes that had taken part in that famous Wandering of the Nations." They had lived in a portion of Germany most remote from the influence of Roman customs and ideas. The Jutes lived in modern Jutland north of the river Schley ; the Angles in the region south of the Jutes and along the shore of the North Sea; and the Saxons in northern Germany, from the base of the Danish peninsula to the mouth of the Rhine. These lands were densely wooded, damp, and cold. Rivers were almost the only highways; clearings in the forests were the only dwelling-places. No Roman, except an occasional merchant, had ever penetrated the country, and no missionary had converted the people to Christianity. At the time of which we are speaking these peoples were still barbarians and heathen, living under Primitive conditions, indulging in rude pleasures, delighting in adventure, and given to acts of cruelty and bloodshed.

So far as is known, they had a very imperfect and unformed political organization. Their kings were merely chieftains who led them in way; their political meetings were the gatherings of leading men, or of the whole fighting force of the tribe, to decide on warlike adventures ; their villages were collections of thatched huts made of wood or turf; and their agriculture consisted principally of yearly ploughings of the soil and the raising of oats, beans, barley, and the like. The people were divided into nobles, freemen, and slaves; their villages were inhabited by families united by blood and religious ties; all lived on flesh, milk, and grains, and because of the wet climate and their rough life, they were heavy drinkers of mead and ale.

Their Migration to Britain

For a hundred years before their migration to the British Isles, the Saxons and their neighbors had been seafarers and plunderers on the coasts of the North Sea. As early as 364 they had been heard of in Britain, and the Romans there had established a special official, the count of the Saxon shore, to guard the coast from The Wash to Pevensey against their attacks. During the remainder of the fourth century the unhappy Romans were beset by the Saxons on the eastern shore, by the Scots on the west, and on the north by the. Picts, who ravaged the territory south of the Tyne and the Solway.

Until 410 the Roman emperor was able, in some degree, to protect his subjects in Britain; but after a terrible invasion of the empire by a horde of Vandals, Burgundians, Suevi, and other Germans in 406, and the capture of Rome by the Visigoth Alaric in 410, the legions were withdrawn, and the Romanized Britains that is, the Brythonic Celts, of whom we have already spoken; were left to defend themselves. The years that followed, from 410 to 450, were a time of misery and terror. The Saxons continued to infest the coasts of the east and southeast; the. Picts continued their invasions ; and the Scots, crossing in their fleets, poured into Britain by way of the Solway Firth, the Dee, and the Severn, and finally made a permanent settlement about 500 on the western coast of Scotland in modern Argyleshire. The Britons in despair made a last appeal to Rome; but in vain. Thrown entirely upon their own resources, they resolved to play off one set of barbarians against the others. Their chief leader, Guthrigernus or Vortigern, summoned to his aid the warlike Jutes under the lead of two chief men or ealdormen, Hengist and Horsa. Then tradition has it that these Jutish war-bands, landing on the island of Thanet, quarrelled with those who had invited them to come, and seized the region later called Kent. Thus began the conquest.

Following the Jutes came the Saxons, the true founders of England, under their war-leaders. Landing on the southern shore, in 477 according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they carved out a kingdom of their own; and during the following twenty years, groups of independent Saxons fought against the Britons of the southwest and won the region about the old Roman city Venta, which is modern Winchester. In the meantime, and afterward also, came the Angles, migrating as an entire folk, not as groups of warriors like the Jutes and Saxons; and by 526 they had occupied the east coast, settling as two kingless tribes, the northfolk and southfolk, in East Anglia. Others of the same tribes gained a foothold farther north, and founded in 547 the kingdom of Bernicia, and in 588 that of Deira, covering the coast from The Wash to the Firth of Forth, where, curiously enough, Frisians seem to have made an earlier settlement. Thus, before the close of the sixth century, the Teutonic tribes were in possession of the coast of Britain from the Firth of Forth to the Isle of Wight, and were ready to push their conquests into the interior of the island.