[Sidenote: Old England]

For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England
itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country
which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay
within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart
of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its
pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little
townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.