AngloSaxon Britain Author:Grant Allen General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Original Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Subjects: Anglo-Saxons Great Britain Anglo-Saxon language History / Europe / Great Britain History / Medieval Literary Criticism / Medieval Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the origi... more »nal. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. THE ENGLISH BY THE SHORES OF THE BALTIC. From the notices left us by Baeda in Britain, and by Nithard and others on the continent, of the habits and manners which distinguished those Saxons who remained in the old fatherland, we are able to form some idea of the primitive condition of those other Saxons, English, and Jutes, who afterwards colonised Britain, during the period while they still all lived together in the heather-clad wastes and marshy lowlands of Denmark and Northern Germany. The early heathen poem of Beowulf aso gives us a glimpse of their ideas and their mode of thought. The known physical characteristics of the race, the nature of the country which they inhabited, the analogy of other Germanic tribes, and the recent discoveries of prehistoric archaeology, all help us to piece out a fairly consistent picture of their appearance, their manner of life, and their rude political institutions. We must begin by dismissing from our minds all those modern notions which are almost inevitably implied by the use of language directly derived from that of our heathen ancestors, but now mixed up in our conceptions with the most advanced forms of European civilisation. We must not allow such words-as " king " and " English " to mislead us into a species- of filial blindness to the real nature of our Teutonic forefathers. The little community of wild farmers and warriors who lived amon...« less