The Ethnology of the British Islands

by R. G. Latham

Saxony and Saxon we have seen to be, for the most part, general names for certain populations[186] of considerable magnitude, populations which when investigated in detail have been Ostphali, Angrarii, Stormarii, &c., &c. Ptolemy alone assigns to the word a specific power, and in Ptolemy alone is the country of the Saxons the definite circumscribed area of a special population. Ptolemy, as has been already shewn, places the Saxons on the neck of the Chersonese to the north of the Chauci of the Elbe, and to the East of the Sigulones—there or thereabouts in Stormar. He also gives them three of the islands off the coasts of Holstein and Sleswick; though it is uncertain and unimportant which three he means. Hence, the Saxons of Ptolemy, truly Nord-albingian, coincide in locality with the subsequent Stormarii, the Sigulones being similarly related to the Holsatians. Yet neither the Saxones nor the Sigulones may have been the ancestors to their respective successors, any more than the Durotriges, or Iceni of England were the ancestors to the Anglo-Saxons of Dorsetshire and Norfolk.

Before this point comes under consideration we must ask a question already suggested as to the Saxons of the ninth century. Were they Frisians or Angles?

Strongly impressed with the belief that no third division of the Saxon section of the Germans beyond that represented by the Angles of Hanover and the Old Saxons of Westphalia can[187] be shewn to have existed or need be assumed, I have thus limited the problem, although the third question as to the probability of their having been something different from either may be raised. I also believe that the Frisians reached Sleswick by an extension of their frontier, this being the reason why the original continuity of their area is assumed,—at the same time admitting the possibility of their having come by sea, in which case no such continuity is necessary. What we find on the Eyder, and also on the Elbe may fairly be supposed to have once been discoverable in the intermediate country.

Assuming, then, an original continuity of the Frisian area from Sleswick to the Elbe anterior to the conquest of Ditmarsh and Holsatia by the present Low German occupants to be a fair inference from the present distribution of the North Frisians, and the history of their known and recorded displacements, we may ask how far it follows that this displacement was effected by the ancestors of the present Holsteiners; in other words, how far it is certain that the present Holsteiners succeeded immediately to the Frisians. There is a question here; since the continuity may have been broken by a population which was itself broken-up in its turn. It may have been broken by Angle inroads even as early as the time of Tacitus. If so, the order of succession[188] would not be 1. Frisian, 2. Low German, but 1. Frisian, 2. Angle or Anglo-Saxon, 3. Low German.

The Holsati, Stormarii, and Ditmarsi were, most probably, Angle. That they were not the ancestors of the present Low-Dutch is nearly certain. The date is too early for this. It was not till some time after the death of Charlemagne that the spread of that section of the German family reached Holstein. That they were not Frisian is less certain, but it is inferred from the manner in which they are mentioned by the native poet already quoted; who, if he had considered the Frisians to have been sufficiently Saxon to pass under that denomination, would have carried his Nordalbingian Saxony as far as the most northern boundary of the North-Frisians.

The evidence, then, is in favour of the Nordalbingians having been Anglo-Saxon in the ninth century, and that under the name Stormarii, Holsati, and Ditmarsi. Were they equally so in the third, i.e., when Ptolemy wrote, and when the names under which he noticed them were Saxones and Sigulones? I should not like to say this. The encroachment upon the Frisian area—the continuity being assumed—may not have begun thus early. Nay, even the northward extension of the Frisian area may not have begun. I should not even like to say positively that the Saxons of Ptolemy were German at all.[189] They may have been Slavonians—a continuation of the Wagrian and Polabic populations of Eastern Holstein and Lauenburg.

To say, too, that Ptolemy's term Saxon was a native name would be hazardous. We can only say that when we get definite information respecting the districts to which it applied it was not so. It was no Nordalbingian name to the Stormarians, no Nordalbingian name to the Holsatians, no Nordalbingian name to the men of Ditmarsh, no Nordalbingian name to any of the islanders. It was no native name with any specific import at all. It was a general name applied to the countries in question, as it was to many others besides; and it was the Franks who applied it. It had been specific once; but, when it was so, no one knew who bore it, or who gave it. It may have been Slavonic applied to Slavonians, or German applied to Germans, or German applied to Slavonians, or Slavonic applied to Germans. Which was it?

Who bore it? In the first instance the occupants of the northern bank of the Elbe, and some of the islands of the coast of Holstein and Sleswick; men of the wooded districts of Holt-satia, whose timber gave them the means of building ships, and whose situation on the coast developed the habit of using them to the annoyance of their neighbours. This is all that can be said.[190]

Who spread it abroad? The Romans first, the Franks afterwards. They it was who called by the name of Saxon men who never so called themselves, e.g., the Angrivarians, the Westphalians, the Saxons of Upper Saxony.

How did the Romans get it? From the Kelts of Gaul and Britain.