mong them. In
like manner, two German tribes became the master races in Spain. The
Burgundians came down from the shores of the Baltic Sea and gave their
name to their new home in the fertile valley of the Saone (Son);
the Vandals came out of Germany to roam through Spain, finally
founding a kingdom in Africa; while the Lombards crossed the Alps to
become the masters of the Valley of the Po, whither the Gauls had gone
before them, seven hundred years earlier.
[Illustration: Goths on the March]
[Illustration: Franks Crossing the Rhine]
The island now known as Great Britain, which was inhabited two
thousand years ago by the Britons and Gaels, Celtic peoples, was
overrun and conquered in part about 450 A.D. by the Saxons and Angles,
Germanic tribes, after whom part of the island was called Angleland.
(The men from the south of England are of the same blood as the Saxons
in the German army, against whom they had to fight in the great war.)
Then came Danes, who partially conquered the Angles and Saxons, and
after them, in 1066 A.D., the country was again conquered by the
Normans, descendants of some Norsemen, who, one hundred and fifty
years before, had come down from Norway and conquered a large
territory in the northwestern part of France.
[Illustration: Men of Normandy Landing in England.]
In some cases, the conquered tribes moved on to other lands, leaving
their former homes to their conquerors. In this way the Britons and
Gaels gave up the greater part of their land to the Angles and Saxons
and withdrew to the hills and mountains of Wales, Cornwall, and
northern Scotland. In other cases, the conquered people and their
conquerors inhabited the same lands side by side, as the Normans
settled down in England among the Anglo-Saxons.
In the early days of savagery, one tribe would frequently make a raid
upon another neighboring tribe and bring home with it some captives
who became slaves, working without pay for their conquerors and
possessing no more rights than beasts of burden. (This custom exists
today in the interior of Africa, and was responsible for the infamous
African slave trade. Black captives were sold to white traders through
the greed of their captors, who forgot that their own relatives and
friends might be carried off and sold across the seas by some other
tribe of blacks.)
When these slaves were kept as the servants of their conquerors, their
number was very small as compared with that of thei
|