PIRATES AND PILLAGERS 3 



scholars and divines who sought to bring about with 

 holy methods blessings to succeed the havoc of the 

 sword. 



Green, who tells us how these things came to pass in 

 early North Sea days, adds that by the close of the fifth 

 century the whole coast of Britain, from the Wash to 

 Southampton Water, was in the hands of the invaders. 

 But little more than the coast had been touched by the 

 invaders ; " great masses of woodland or fen still prisoned 

 the Engle, the Saxon, and the Jute alike within narrow 

 limits," the Engle having appeared in the estuaries of the 

 Forth and the Humber. 



The Humber to-day maintains a proud association 

 with the North Sea a connection that has been unbroken 

 ever since those stormy times when England was begin- 

 ning as a nation. All along the north-east coast, from 

 Spurn to Berwick and beyond, the traveller by land or 

 sea may yet behold romantic evidences of warlike and 

 religious doings by the peoples of the past. From the 

 water he may gaze towards the ruins of the abbeys and 

 the castles on the coast and little islands, and from the 

 comfort of a dining-car may see, journeying from Ouse 

 to Tweed, remains of noble buildings which have made 

 their mark in history. 



The North Sea washes the long coast-line of Great 

 Britain's most extensive county Yorkshire ; and on 

 Yorkshire's greatest river, the Humber, stands the 

 Empire's third largest port. That county contains the 

 oldest railway in the world, the Stockton and Darlington, 

 long ago absorbed by the North- Eastern Railway 

 Company, whose system covers not only some of the 

 most romantic of all the North Sea borders, but also 



