The Angles of Beda.—The statement of Beda respecting the Angles, like his statement concerning the Jutes, reappears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and in Alfred.
Ethelweard[[16]] also adopts it:—"Anglia vetus sita est inter Saxones et Giotos, habens oppidum capitale quod
sermone Saxonico Sleswic nuncupatur, secundum vero Danos Hathaby."
Nevertheless, it is exceptionable and unsatisfactory; and like the previous one, in all probability, an incorrect inference founded upon the misinterpretation of a name.
In the eighth century there was, and at the present moment there is, a portion of the duchy of Sleswick called Anglen or the corner. It is really what its name denotes, a triangle of irregular shape, formed by the Slie, the firth of Flensborg, and a line drawn from Flensborg to Sleswick. It is just as Danish as the rest of the peninsula, and cannot be shown to have been occupied by a Germanic population at all. Its area is less than that of the county of Rutland, and by no means likely to have supplied such a population as that of the Angles of England. The fact of its being a desert at the time of Beda is credible; since it formed a sort of March or Debatable Ground between the Saxons and Slavonians of Holstein, and the Danes of Jutland.
Now if we suppose that the real Angles of Germany were either so reduced in numbers as to have become an obscure tribe, or so incorporated with other populations as to have lost their independent existence, we can easily see how the similarity of name, combined with the geographical contiguity of Anglen to the Saxon frontier, might mislead even so good a writer as Beda, into the notion that he had found the country of the Angles in the Angulus (Anglen) of Sleswick.
The true Angles were the descendants of the Angli of Tacitus. Who these were will be investigated in §§ [47]-[54].
[§ 16]. The Saxons of Beda.—The Saxons of Beda reached from the country of the Old Saxons[[29]] on the
Lippe, in Westphalia, to that of the Nordalbingian[[30]] Saxons between the Elbe and Eyder; and nearly, but not quite, coincided with the present countries of Hanover, Oldenburg, Westphalia, and part of Holstein. This we may call the Saxon, or (as reasons will be given for considering that it nearly coincided with the country of the Angles) the Anglo-Saxon area.
[§ 17]. River-system and sea-board of the Anglo-Saxon area.—As the invasion of England took place by sea, we must expect to find in the invaders a maritime population. This leads to the consideration of the physical character of that part of Germany which they occupied. And here comes a remarkable and unexpected fact. The line of coast between the Rhine and Elbe, the line which in reasoning a priori, we should fix upon as the most likely tract for the bold seamen who wrested so large an island as Great Britain from its original occupants (changing it from Britain to England), to have proceeded from, is not the country of the Anglo-Saxons. On the contrary, it is the country of a similar but different section of the Germanic population, a section which has not received the attention from the English historian which it deserves. The country in question is the area of—