wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes
transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths
of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we are
at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Angles
at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out from
the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their
descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and
the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered
Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which
are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the
landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea
deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much
as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodge
them, and the absence of centralized government and national
consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent,
east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next
morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy
success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours,
the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and
rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and
all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home
of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be
traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south the
Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; in
the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north they
retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in which
they met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhaps
disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons,
South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed march
or borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons or