CHAPTER IV.

THE COLONISATION OF THE COAST.


Though the myths which surround the arrival of the English in Britain
have little historical value, they are yet interesting for the light
which they throw incidentally upon the habits and modes of thought of
the colonists. They have one character in common with all other legends,
that they grow fuller and more circumstantial the further they proceed
from the original time. Bæda, who wrote about A.D. 700, gives them in a
very meagre form: the English Chronicle, compiled at the court of
Ælfred, about A.D. 900, adds several important traditional particulars:
while with the romantic Geoffrey of Monmouth, A.D. 1152, they assume the
character of full and circumstantial tales. The less men knew about the
conquest, the more they had to tell about it.

Among the most sacred animals of the Aryan race was the horse. Even in
the Indian epics, the sacrifice of a horse was the highest rite of the
primitive religion. Tacitus tells us that the Germans kept sacred white
horses at the public expense, in the groves and woods of the gods: and
that from their neighings and snortings, auguries were taken. Amongst
the people of the northern marshlands, the white horse seems to have
been held in especial honour, and to this day a white horse rampant
forms the cognisance of Hanover and Brunswick. The English settlers
brought this, their national emblem, with them to Britain, and cut its
figure on the chalk downs as they advanced westward, to mark the
progress of their conquest. The white horses on the Berkshire and