hen but a wild
waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.

[Sidenote: The English Village]

Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.
But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them
to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must
have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their
villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us
in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the
village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the
townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social
centre was the homestead where the aetheling or eorl, a descendant of the
first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and
traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or aethel, each in its
little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men
sprung, it may be, from descendants of