The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, lived in the marshy
forests and along the winding fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula
of Denmark, which still preserves their name in our own day. The English
dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad neck of the peninsula, which
we now call Sleswick. And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the
flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to that of the Rhine.
At the period when history lifts the curtain upon the future Germanic
colonists of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of the
low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North Sea, and closely
connected with other tribes on either side, such as the Frisians and the
Danes, who still speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian
languages.

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the relationship between
the first Teutonic settlers in Britain and their continental brethren.
Not only are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly connected
with the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in the
colonisation of the island at all; and more closely connected with the
Frisians, some of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical
hordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a later date in all
the northern counties: but they are also most closely connected of all
with those members of the colonising tribes who did not themselves bear
a share in the settlement, and whose descendants are still living in
Denmark and in various parts of Germany. The English proper, it is true,
seem to have deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body; so that,
according to Bæda, the Christian historian of Northumberland, in his
time this oldest England by the shores of the Baltic lay waste and
unpeopled, through the completeness of the exodus. But the Jutes appear
to have migrated in small numbers, while the larger part of the tribe
remained at home in their native marshland; and of the more numerous