ong hair floated in the wind. He was bound to protect his kinsmen from
wrong and injustice. The land which inclosed the village, whether
reserved for pasture, wood, or tillage, was undivided, and every free
villager had the right of turning his cattle and swine upon it, and also
of sharing in the division of the harvest. The basis of the life was
agricultural. Our Saxon ancestors in Germany did not subsist exclusively
by hunting or fishing, although these pursuits were not neglected. They
were as skilful with the plough and mattock as they were in steering a
boat or hunting a deer or pursuing a whale. They were coarse in their
pleasures, but religious in their turn of mind; Pagans, indeed, but
worshipping the powers of Nature with poetic ardor. They were born
warriors, and their passion for the sea led to adventurous enterprise.
Before the close of the third century their boats, driven by fifty oars,
had been seen in the British waters; and after the Romans had left the
Britons to defend themselves against the Scots and Picts, the harassed
rulers of the land invoked the aid of these Saxon pirates, and, headed
by two ealdormen,--Hengist and Horsa,--they landed on the Isle of Thanet
in the year 449.

These two chieftains are the earliest traditionary heroes of the Saxons
in England. Their mercenary work was soon done, and after it was done
they had no idea of retiring to their own villages in Germany. They cast
their greedy eyes on richer pastures and more fruitful fields.
Brother-pirates flocked from the Elbe and Rhine to their settlement in
Thanet. In forty-five years after Hengist and Horsa landed, Cerdic with
a more formidable band had taken possession of a large part of the
southern coast, and pushed his way to Winchester and founded the
kingdom of Wessex. But the work of conquest was slow. It took seventy
years for the Saxons to become masters of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Essex, and Wessex.

A stout resistance to the invading Saxons had been made by the native
Britons, headed by Arthur,--a legendary hero, who is thought to have
lived near the close of the fifth century. His deeds and those of the
knights of the Round Table form the subject of one of the most
interesting romances of the Middle Ages, probably written in the
brightest age of chivalry, and by a monk very ignorant of history, since
he gives many Norman names to his characters. But all the valor of the
Celtic hero and his chivalrous followers was of no av