[19] See [Chapter ix].
CHAPTER IX.
THE SAXONS—OF UPPER SAXONY—OF LOWER OR OLD SAXONY.—NORDALBINGIANS.—SAXONS OF PTOLEMY.—PRESENT AND ANCIENT POPULATIONS OF SLESWICK-HOLSTEIN.—NORTH-FRISIANS.—PROBABLE ORIGIN OF THE NAME SAXON.—THE LITTUS SAXONICUM.—SAXONES BAJOCASSINI.
The ethnologist of England has to deal with a specific section of those numerous Germans, who, in different degrees of relationship to each other, have been known, at different times, under the name of Saxon; a name which has by no means a uniform signification, a name which has been borne by every single division and subdivision of the Teutonic family, the Proper Goths alone excepted. At present, however, he only knows that the counties of Es-sex, Sus-sex, and Middle-sex are the localities of the East-Saxons, the South-Saxons, and the Middle-Saxons, respectively; that in the sixth and seventh centuries there was a Kingdom of Wes-sex, or the West-Saxons; that Angle and Saxon were nearly convertible terms; and that Anglo-Saxon is the name of the English Language in its oldest known stage. How these names came to be so nearly synonymous, or how certain south-eastern counties of England and a German[166] Kingdom on the frontier of Bohemia, bear names so much alike as Sus-sex and Sax-ony, are questions which he has yet to solve.
The German Kingdom of Saxony may be disposed of first. It is chiefly in name that it has any relation to the Saxon parts of England. In language and blood there are numerous points of difference. The original population was Slavonic, which began to be displaced by Germans from the left bank of the Saale as early as the seventh century; possibly earlier. The language of these Slavonians was spoken in the neighbourhood of Leipsic as late as the fourteenth century, and at the present time two populations in Silesia and Lusatia still retain it—the Srbie, and Srskie. Sorabi, Milcieni, Siusli, and Lusicii, are the designations of these populations in the time of Charlemagne; and, earlier still, they were included in the great name of Semnones. It is only because they were conquered from that part of Germany which was called Saxonia or Saxenland, or else because numerous colonies of the previously reduced Saxons of the Lower Weser were planted on their territory, that their present name became attached to them. Slavonic in blood, and High German in language, the Saxons of the Upper Elbe, or the Saxons of Upper Saxony, are but remotely connected with the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons of Britain.[167]
In Upper Saxony, at least, the name is not native.
Lower Saxony was the country on the Lower Elbe, and also of the Lower Weser, and until the extension of the name to the parts about Leipsic and Dresden, was simply known as Saxonia, or the Land of the Saxones; at least, the qualifying adjective Lower made no part of the designation. Saxony was what it was called by the Merovingian Franks, as well as the Carlovingians who succeeded them. Whether, however, any portion of the indigenæ so called itself is uncertain. In the latter half of the eighth century it falls into three divisions, two of which are denoted by geographical or political designations, and one by the name of a native population.
The present district of West-phalia was one of them; its occupants being called West-falahi, West-falai, West-fali. These were the Saxons of the Rhine. Contrasted with these, the East-phalians (Ost-falai, Ost-falahi, Ost-fali, Oster-leudi, Austre-leudi, Aust-rasii), stretched towards the Elbe.