temples were mere stockades of wood, with rude blocks or monoliths to
represent deities and altars. Probably their few rites consisted merely
of human or other sacrifices to the gods or the ghosts of departed
chiefs. There was a regular priesthood of the great gods, but each man
was priest for his own household. As in most other heathen communities,
the real worship of the people was mainly directed to the special family
deities of every hearth. The great gods were appealed to by the
chieftains and by the race in battle: but the household gods or deified
ancestors received the chief homage of the churls by their own
firesides.

Thus the Anglo-Saxons, before the great exodus from Denmark and North
Germany, appear as a race of fierce, cruel, and barbaric pagans,
delighting in the sea, in slaughter, and in drink. They dwelt in little
isolated communities, bound together internally by ties of blood, and
uniting occasionally with others only for purposes of rapine. They lived
a life which mainly alternated between grazing, piratical seafaring, and
cattle-lifting; always on the war-trail against the possessions of
others, when they were not specially engaged in taking care of their
own. Every record and every indication shows them to us as fiercer
heathen prototypes of the Scotch clans in the most lawless days of the
Highlands. Incapable of union for any peaceful purpose at home, they
learned their earliest lesson of subordination in their piratical
attacks upon the civilised Christian community of Roman Britain. We
first meet with them in history in the character of destroyers and
sea-robbers. Yet they possessed already in their wild marshy home the
germs of those free institutions which have made the history of England
unique amongst the nations of Europe.