war, and they had many other deities, the names of some of whom are still preserved in our English tongue, little altered, in those of the days of the week. War was the only honourable occupation, and each chief habitually set forth to plunder the richer nations which had fallen under the Roman sway; and although when they first appeared on the coasts of the provinces their vessels were mere boats, and their arms rude and scanty in supply, their daring courage compensated these disadvantages.

Each chief appears to have been wholly independent, acknowledging no superior, but we may fairly conclude from what is recorded of other nations, that confederacies were formed among them under some distinguished leader when any rich prize was in prospect; and thus, and by the junction of other tribes whom the Romans had not been able fully to subdue, as well as by actual colonization in many quarters, the Saxons so extended themselves that their name became, before the close of the third century, a general one for the sea rovers of the North, without implying any national affinity, being in fact derived from the long knife (“seax”) which at first formed their principal weapon. Soon, however, either from the spoils of the vanquished or their own industry, or both, they were provided also with long spears and ponderous battle-axes, and their vessels, now denominated chiules, or war-ships, were of sufficient size to

A chief of priestly as well as warlike character, styled Sigge Fridulfsen, came from the region near the Caspian sea into the north of Europe, probably not long before the Christian era. The Northern Sagas describe him as the wisest and best of men, and he was after death confounded with their deity by the rude natives, grateful for some degree of civilization imparted.

E

Such a

convey a body of several hundred men each. number of hardy pirates suddenly landing, had little to fear from the comparatively unwarlike provincials, and what had been at first a mere plundering incursion often became a fixed settlement, in the neighbourhood of which fresh descents could be made with assured success; and it is the opinion of many writers that scattered bodies of Saxons were located on various parts of the coast long before the period usually assigned for the first coming of their nation to Britain.

There is abundant evidence that these people rapidly extended themselves along the east coast of the German ocean as far as the Rhine, and before the year 300 their ravages had become so frequent and so formidable that the whole district from the Elbe to the British channel was known as the Saxon Shore, and officers were appointed both in Britain and in Gaul to whom the task of guarding the sea-board of the Roman possessions was assigned, under the title at first of Counts of the Sea-Shore, and afterwards, as the Saxons came more prominently forward, of Counts of the Saxon Shore. One of the earliest of these maritime prefects was Carausius, who took advantage of the fleet entrusted to him for the purpose of his office to establish himself as an independent ruler in Britain.

Meantime the Saxons pursued their ravages with little check, and spread such terror of their name that the emperor Julian and the historian Procopius, equally with Ammianus Marcellinus and Zosimus, speak of them as more fierce and formidable than any other of the barbarous nations. By land as well as by sea they

appeared irresistible; for when they had ravaged the coasts, they ascended the rivers; when their chiules, or their smaller vessels, could penetrate no farther, they were abandoned, and the rovers, seizing on such horses as they could find, pushed fearlessly into the interior, as a mixed force of horse and foot, and wasted with fire and sword every district they approached, until at length some river was reached, descending which with such rude barks as they could hastily construct, they again launched on the ocean, to pursue another career of devastation.

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"We have not,” says Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gaulish bishop of the fifth century, a more cruel and more dangerous enemy than the Saxons: they overcome all who have the courage to oppose them; they surprise all who are so imprudent as not to be prepared for their attack. When they pursue, they infallibly overtake; when they are pursued, their escape is certain. They despise danger; they are inured to shipwreck; they are eager to purchase booty with the peril of their lives. Tempests, which to others are so dreadful, to them are subjects of joy; the storm is their protection when they are pressed by the enemy, and a cover for their operations when they meditate an attack. Before they quit their own shores, they devote to the altars of their gods the tenth part of the principal captives; and when they are on the point of returning, the lots are cast with an affectation of equity, and the impious vow is fulfilled."

This picture, in which fear and hatred are alike apparent, might be suspected of exaggeration, but its main features are fully justified by the whole tenor of the

Icelandic Sagas, the nearest cotemporary accounts on the side of the ravagers that have come down to us; for though immediately relating to the Northmen of the eighth and succeeding centuries, no reasonable doubt can be entertained that they are also fairly applicable to their Saxon precursors. In these writings we find it constantly affirmed, that "the gods are with the strongest;" that human sacrifices are absolutely necessary to gain and preserve their favour; that war is the only fitting occupation of free men; that the only desirable death is that on the field of battle, or its substitute suicide; and that those who fell by the sword were thus marked out as the especial favourites of their fierce divinities, and were alone admitted to the hall of Woden (Valhalla), where their time passed in alternate fighting and feasting; whilst for cowards (for such seem to have existed among them) and those who died a natural death, were reserved all the pains of Niflheim (literally, Evil Home), a shadowy region of, torment.

Men holding such ideas would naturally be at least as regardless of the lives of others as of their own, and being also, after their barbarous fashion, devout, they thought they did their gods service by wreaking especial vengeance on the most sacred objects of the Christian communities that they invaded. Hence the destruction of churches and murder of priests which the Saxon Chronicle relates as part of every ravage committed by the Northmen, and which had been before practised by the Saxons themselves, as Gildas informs us, whose tes

b Sigge, or Woden, their great exemplar, was supposed to have killed himself when he found the infirmities of age coming on.

timony may in this case well be believed, for if they had not been actuated by a fierce hatred of Christianity, their reception of its saving doctrines, we may presume, would not have been so long delayed.

Yet these people, like all the branches of the great German race, had even in their rudest state qualities which shew that they deserve a more favourable judgment than is often formed of them. Their free spirit, their active, adventurous character, the lofty sense of personal honour shewn in their earliest codes of laws, and above all, that base of true civilization, their high estimate of woman, are noble features in themselves, but doubly interesting to us as shewing that our country owes her proud place among the nations mainly to the development of the feelings, the principles, and the institutes of our Saxon forefathers.

THE HEPTARCHYa.

WHEN the acquisitions of the Anglo-Saxon invaders assumed something of a settled form, they are found in the main to be mere subdivisions of the old Roman provinces.

The Jutish kingdom of Kent, and the South Saxon kingdom, may be represented by the modern counties of

See p. 167.

The number of independent states founded by the invaders was at least nine, if not ten; but as the small Mid-Saxon kingdom (now Middlesex) very soon ceased to exist, and the two Northumbrian states of Bernicia and Deira were frequently governed by one ruler, it is customary, though not strictly correct, to speak of the whole as the Heptarchy.