6. Of Salic land no portion of the inheritance shall go to a woman; but the whole inheritance of the land shall belong to the male sex.[67]
LXII.
1. If any one's father shall have been slain, the sons shall have half the compounding money [wergeld]; and the other half, the Payment of wergeld nearest relatives, as well on the mother's as on the father's side, shall divide among themselves.[68]
2. But if there are no relatives, paternal or maternal, that portion shall go to the fisc.[69]
CHAPTER V.
THE ANGLES AND SAXONS IN BRITAIN
8. The Saxon Invasion (cir. 449)
The Venerable Bede, the author of the passage given below, was born about 673 in Northumberland and spent most of his life in the Benedictine abbey of Jarrow on the Tyne, where he died in 735. He was a man of broad learning and untiring industry, famous in all parts of Christendom by reason of the numerous scholarly books that he wrote. The chief of these was his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, covering the period from the first invasion of Britain by Cæsar (B.C. 55) to the year 731. In this work Bede dealt with many matters lying properly outside the sphere of church history, so that it is exceedingly valuable for the light which it throws on both the military and political affairs of the early Anglo-Saxons in Britain. As an historian Bede was fair-minded and as accurate as his means of information permitted.
The Angle and Saxon seafarers from the region we now know as Denmark and Hanover had infested the shores of Britain for two centuries or more before the coming of Hengist and Horsa which Bede here describes. The withdrawal of the Roman garrisons about the year 410 left the Britons at the mercy of the wilder Picts and Scots of the north and west, and as a last resort King Vortigern decided to call in the Saxons to aid in his campaign of defense. Such, at least, is the story related by Gildas, a Romanized British chronicler who wrote about the year 560, and this was the view adopted by Bede. Recent writers, as Mr. James H. Ramsay in his Foundations of England, are inclined to cast serious doubts upon the story because it seems hardly probable that any king would have taken so foolish a step as that attributed to Vortigern.[70] At any rate, whether by invitation or for pure love of seafaring adventure, certain it is that the Saxons and Angles made their appearance at the little island of Thanet, on the coast of Kent, and found the country so much to their liking that they chose to remain rather than return to the over-populated shores of the Baltic. There are many reasons for believing that people of Germanic stock had been settled more or less permanently in Britain long before the traditional invasion of Hengist and Horsa. Yet we are justified in thinking of this interesting expedition as, for all practical purposes, the beginning of the long and stubborn struggle of Germans to possess the fruitful British isle. While Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Vandals and Lombards were breaking across the Rhine-Danube frontier and finding new homes in the territories of the Roman Empire, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the farther north were led by their seafaring instincts to make their great movement, not by land, but by water, and into a country which the Romans had a good while before been obliged to abandon. There they were free to develop their own peculiar Germanic life and institutions, for the most part without undergoing the changes which settlement among the Romans produced in the case of the tribes whose migrations were towards the Mediterranean.
Source—Bæda, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [Bede, "Ecclesiastical History of the English People">[, Bk. I., Chaps. 14-15. Translated by J. A. Giles (London, 1847), pp. 23-25.