They were pagans, and the native Britons had become Christian. Perhaps that, in part, is why they treated the Britons so badly. But we have to be on our guard about believing quite all that is told us of their cruelty; because the only people who have told us about it, who wrote the history of the time and of the doings of the conquerors, were clerics, clerks of the holy orders, monks of a Christian monastery.
Druids
Britain had been Christian, because the Romans had introduced Christianity and established it in the stead of the old Druid religion of which the great stone circle at Stonehenge remains as a monument. But England was now pagan, and followed the religion of the North, whose gods were Woden, or Odin, the god of battles, who gives us our name for one of the days of the week—Woden's day, or Wednesday, and Thor, the god of the hammer, the great smith, like Vulcan in the religion which the Romans took from Greece. From Thor we get our Thursday. And Freia, the goddess who was supposed to be the wife of Odin, gives us our Friday. Tuesday is the day of the god Tiw.
STONEHENGE.
The Druidical circle, from the air, at the present day.
R. R. Edwards. Salisbury.
By way of completing the story of our weekdays—Sunday, of course, is the day of the Sun; Monday, of the Moon. And Saturday—and you should note this, because it shows what a mixture our language is of words taken from the Saxon on the one side and from the Latin, the Roman, on the other—Saturday is the day of Saturn, one of the Roman gods adopted from the Greek.
For more than a century England remained pagan. It was not till very nearly A.D. 600 that any attempt was made to bring in Christianity again. That attempt was made in the south-eastern corner of England, just where the Anglo-Saxon pagans themselves had landed, and quite near our present chief cathedral town of Canterbury. But the revival of Christianity in England did not really come that way. The northern kingdoms in England were too strong for any influence from the southern kingdom to prevail, Christianity was reintroduced into England from Ireland, whither the Saxons had never come to destroy it. It came by way of an island, Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, and so across to the Holy Island, off the coast of Northumberland.
Then arose great fighting between the heathen, under Penda, King of Mercia and of the "Middle English," as you will read of their being called, and Christians under Oswi, King of Northumbria. Oswi utterly defeated Penda in A.D. 655 and from that victory followed the establishment of Christianity as the accepted religion over the British islands.
All this story of England under the rule of the Anglo-Saxons is separate and quite apart, for very many years, from the rest of the great story, which is, at this time, chiefly concerned with the destruction by the barbarians of the Western Roman Empire. It will come very closely into the great story again before many centuries are past, and you will see that it is closely involved in it by the time we reach the end of this volume; but until 600 or so, England is rather out of the main current of European history.