showed no innate aversion to the ways and works of Rome; but they
entered upon provinces which had already been impoverished and
depopulated by the scourge of war. Such races proceeded rapidly with the
construction of a new social and political order, because the past was a
sealed book to them. Roman law vanished from England so completely as to
leave it doubtful whether the Saxons ever came to terms with the
provincials; it was tolerated but not encouraged by the Franks; it was
in great measure set aside by the Lombards; it seems to have been
unknown to the Alemanni and Bavarians. We shall see in the sequel the
importance of these facts. The future of Europe lay not with the Goths
or with the Burgundians, but with more ignorant or less impressionable
races who, rather by good fortune than by choice, escaped the vices in
missing the lessons of Roman civilisation. The Franks and the Saxons, as
we find them described by Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede, were
far from resembling the noble savage imagined by Tacitus and other
idealists. But they were trained for future empire in the hard school of
a northern climate.

All that concerns us in the history of these kingdoms can be briefly
stated.

(1) Teutonic England hardly enters into European history before the year
800. In the fifth and sixth centuries a multitude of small colonies had
been founded on the soil of Roman Britain by the three tribes of the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who migrated thither from Jutland and
Schleswig-Holstein. A few considerable kingdoms had emerged from this
chaos by the time when the English received from Rome their first
Christian teacher, St. Augustine: Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the south;
Mercia and East Anglia in the Midlands; Northumbria between the Humber
and the Forth. The efforts of every ruler were devoted to the