ness of the land and the weakness of its defenders, and their conquest of Britain began.

The real story of the invasion is wholly different from the popular conception of hordes of warlike invaders overrunning a country inhabited by a defenseless people. The Britons, once driven to the wall, fought with the fury of desperation. It was not until 475 A. D., twenty-six years after their landing at Thanet, that the capture of the last British fortress in Kent gave that little corner of Britain to the invaders. The conquest of this portion illustrates the pertinacity of attack and stubbornness of resistance which characterized the entire conquest of the island. Very striking, also, is the lack of unity and of national spirit among the Britons which could thus allow Kent to fight and fall alone. A similar want of cooperation among the Britons marked almost the entire AngloSaxon conquest.

But the invaders, though coming tribe by tribe, evidently descended upon selected portions of the coast. They showed their kindred and a certain racial unity by respecting one another's conquests. A new band would take a new strip of coast and conquer up to the boundary of what their predecessors had already mastered. It was not until more than one hundred years after the conquest began that the Jutes and West Saxons came into conflict among the hills of Surrey, but even then the West Saxons quickly drew away to pursue their con

quests of the Britons to the north and west. Though the conquerors are later seen contending over the spoil, in the beginning they respected and supported one another's conquests, by which means their separate attacks had the effect of a concerted invasion.

From the Germanic shores between the Elbe and the Rhine came a people-perhaps portions of many kindred tribes-known to the Celtic inhabitants of the islands as "Saxons," and doubtless so called by themselves, since they perpetuated the title in the names of their kingdoms, as of Essex, Sussex, and Middlesex-names which still designate the corresponding counties of modern England. The Wessex of the West Saxons, for a time best known of all, has disappeared from the modern map. It was in 447, two years after the conquest of Kent by the Jutes, that Saxon invaders swarmed upon the southern shore of Britain. In the year 519, after three-quarters of a century, Cedric, whose kingdom of Wessex was to play so great part in all the early history of England, was crowned king of the West Saxons. But in the very next year the West Saxons suffered a serious defeat at Mount Badon, which effectually stopped their western advance. At this period Welsh legends place the exploits of the famed King Arthur, who may well have been a historic personage. Some leader certainly rallied his race and led them to the victory which checked for thirty-two years, the life-time of a generation, the

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advance of "the heathen from the Northern Sea." Around the name of such a leader the minstrels would soon weave thrilling tales of romance, and the "Knights of the Round Table" would form a convenient setting for the names of any subordinate chieftains whom the bards might delight to honor.

Resuming their advance in the year 552—almost exactly a hundred years after the conquest of Britain began the West Saxons at length met the leagued forces of the cities of Gloucester, Circencester, and Bath, whom they defeated in the great battle of Deorham, in 577, thus gaining command of the rich valley of the Severn, and greatly reducing the resisting power of the British by cutting their dominions in two at that river. From the English Channel to Essex and Gloucester on the north, and from Kent on the east to the border of Wales on the west, a great parallelogram of southern Britain had become practically a Saxon conquest.

So prominent, indeed, were the Saxons in the early conquest of Britain that their name was given by the native Celtic peoples to all the invaders:

"A common name was applied by the Britons to all the alien immigration; and, though each tribe had its own domestic designation, they were, and still are, called Saxons by the Celtic aborigines and their descendants." -MARSH, "Lectures on the English Language," 1st series, lect. ii, p. 34.

Thus the word is often used in Scott's poems and romances. Roderick Dhu exclaims:

"Ay, by my soul! While on yon plain
The Saxon rears one shock of grain;
While, of ten thousand herds, there strays
But one along yon river's maze-
The Gael, of plain and river heir,

Shall, with strong hand, redeem his share.”

-SCOTT, "Lady of the Lake," canto v, stanza 7.

The word Saron has literary use also to denote the Anglo-Saxon people or language as distinguished from the Norman,—a usage made familiar by the same author, as applied to "Cedric, the Saxon" and his race, in "Ivanhoe." The brevity of the term Saxon has led to its frequent use as a substitute for Anglo-Saxon, to distinguish the people and the language, as we read of "Saxon words," "Saxon traits," "vigorous Saxon style.”

Why, then, was not Britain named Saxondom, Saxony, or Saxonland? Because another tribe, of whom we know least, did most. The Angles or Engles came probably from the southern portion of the peninsula of Jutland, where a small district still called Angeln may be a portion of the territory they once occupied. They are mentioned as a distinct people by Tacitus and Ptolemy. The historian Bede (673-735 A. D.), who was one of that people and spent his life among them, records that the whole population of the Angles or Engles left their homes for Britain, and that the land they had originally occupied remained in his own time a dreary waste. Such movements of an entire people were frequent about the breaking-up of the

Roman Empire, as strikingly exemplified in the vast migrations of the Goths, Huns, and Vandals. The complete removal of the Angles from their old homes would be the best explanation of the slight knowledge left us of their life and history on the European continent. They had no cities, palaces, or temples, probably no buildings of brick or stone, no statues or pictures, libraries or monuments. Their weapons and utensils, their jewelry, and the few coins such a people would use in that age of barter, they would carry with them in their ships. Within a generation there would be no more trace of their former presence than the migrating swallow leaves in its summer home. They seem to have been somewhat late in entering England. In the block of territory projecting out almost as a peninsula into the North Sea, they established their kingdom of East Anglia, almost equally divided into the territories of Northfolk and Southfolk, the present counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in England. Wherever we turn in this ancient history we seem to touch the present.

As rivers and inlets were the natural gateways for the sea-rovers, a portion of the Engles entered the Firth of Forth, while another force entered the Humber in 519, one year before the Saxons met their disastrous defeat at Mount Badon. Thus, while the Saxons were checked for more than thirty years in the south, the Engles were at the very opening of their greater conquests in the north.