The Ethnology of the British Islands

by R. G. Latham

Ethelweard speaks of "Anglia vetus, sita inter Saxones et Giotos, habens oppidum capitale, quod sermone Saxonico Sleswic nuncupatur, secundum vero Danos, Hathaby."

A well-known locality in the Duchy of Sleswick supplies the commentary on these texts. A triangular block of land, about the size of the county of Middlesex, is bounded on two of its sides by the Slie and the Firth of Flensburg, and[211] on the third by the road from that town to Sleswick.

Many writers think that the Angles should be placed here; and, thinking this, maintain that no population except that of the Angles or some closely allied tribe has a claim to be considered as the early occupants of Holstein and Sleswick. They overlook, however, the important fact that Ptolemy, who places the Angili in a locality far south of the parts in question, places, in those parts, populations which he separates from his Angili. They also overlook the still more important fact that the only populations earlier than the present of which definite traces can be discovered in either Holstein or Sleswick, are the Frisians and the Slavonians—the Frisians on the west, and the Slavonians on the east.

In another point of view this district is important, although the line of criticism upon which it has its bearing is gradually becoming obsolete. When the direct influence of the Danes and Norwegians upon the language of Britain was less recognized than it is now, it was by no means uncommon to explain such Scandinavian words as occurred by the assumption that they were Angle as opposed to Saxon, the Angle being the most Danish of all the proper German dialects—transitional, perhaps, to the Teutonic and Scandinavian divisions of the so-called Gothic stock.[212] This was a line of criticism difficult to refute; since the advocate of the Angle origin of Danish words might fairly argue that it was not enough to shew that a word was Scandinavian. It must also be shewn to have been non-existent in the North-German dialects. This brought in the proverbial difficulty of proving a negative assertion. Hence, the district of Anglen and Beda's statement concerning it are important.

Now, at the present moment, this district of Anglen is just as Angle or English as the rest of Germany—that is, next to not at all. It is Low German, tinctured with Danish; having once been more Danish still, as is shewn by the geographical names ending in -by, -skov, and -gaard.

The only piece of truly cotemporary evidence in Beda is the statement of its being a waste when he wrote, and this is better explained by supposing it to have been a March, or Debateable Land, between the Germanic and Danish occupants of Sleswick, than by the notion that it was left empty by the exodus of its occupants to Great Britain. The deduction of the Angli from an improbably small area, on the wrong side of the Peninsula, must be looked upon as an inference under the garb of a tradition. Such I believe it to have been; freely, however, admitted that if Anglen poured forth upon England even half the Angles[213] that England contained, it was likely enough to have been most effectually emptied.

At one time I went further than the mere denial of Anglen being the original home of the Angles in the exclusive manner that Beda so evidently considers it, and looked upon the word as a mere translation of the word Angulus—since the area in question is certainly one of the nooks and corners of the Peninsula. But the fact of there being one or two small outlying districts, retaining (I believe) certain privileges, beyond the area bounded by the Slie, the Firth of Flensburg and the road to Sleswick, in the parts about Leck and Bredsted, and on the North-Frisian frontier, has modified this view, and inclined me to the notion that the Anglen districts of Sleswick were really Angle—though Angle only in the way that Britain was Angle, i.e., from the effect of an invasion from Hanover. If so, although we fail in finding in Sleswick the mother-country of the English, we get a detail in the history of the Angles of Germany instead—this being that certain Angles, probably at the time they were reducing Britain, may have turned their faces northwards, and effected settlements in certain parts of Sleswick, having, previously, reached the Trave. Hence they achieved a small maritime conquest on the coast of the Baltic, just as they effected certain large ones on the shores of[214] Britain. Why do I suppose this to have been by sea? Because, when true history begins, whatever the men of Anglen in Sleswick may have been, the intermediate parts of Holstein are Wagrian. The settlement, then, in Anglen, is just a detail in the naval history of the Angles, during the period of their rise and progress—that is, if it be anything Angle at all.

A notice of Procopius now finds place. An Angle princess betrothed to Radiger, prince of the Varni, is deserted by her promised husband for Theodechild, his father's widow, and avenges herself by sailing for the mouth of the Rhine with a large fleet, conquering her undervaluer, forgiving him as women are likely, and dismissing her rival, as they are sure to do in such cases. To deny "all historical foundation to this tale," writes Mr. Kemble,[22] "would perhaps be carrying scepticism to an unreasonable extent. Yet the most superficial examination proves that in all its details, at least, it is devoid of accuracy. The period during which the events described must be placed, is between the years 534 and 547; and it is very certain that the Varni were not settled at that time where Procopius has placed them; on that locality we can only look for Saxons. It is hardly necessary to say that a fleet of four hundred ships and an army of one hundred thousand Angles,[215] led by a woman, are not data upon which we could implicitly rely in calculating either the political or military power of any English principality at the commencement of the sixth century, or that ships capable of carrying two hundred-and-fifty men each, had hardly been launched at that time from any port in England. Still I am not altogether disposed to deny the possibility of predatory expeditions from the settled parts of the island adjoining the eastern coasts."

From this criticism I only differ in thinking that, instead of Procopius having mistaken Saxons for Varni, he has mistaken the Elbe for the Rhine.

It is a point of some uncertainty, but of no great importance to ascertain whether the Angle subjects of the insulted but forgiveful princess were from Britain or from Hanover—islanders already in a state of reaction against their continental fatherland, or simply Angles of the Elbe. The accounts of Procopius respecting both countries are eminently obscure and contradictory. It is only certain that as early as the ninth century there were continental writers who attributed to the Germans of Britain movements from the Island to the Continent as far back from their own time as the fifth century. Nay, later still, there were some historians who wholly reversed the order of Anglo-Saxon migration,[216] and deduced the true Fatherland Germans from England.