76 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XV. No. 365 



the range of Eoinan knowledge. But of the Saxon shipmen 

 and their doings we know a good deal : Sidonius has taken no 

 small pains to show what manner of men they seemed to be in 

 the eyes of the Roman of Gaul. ' They first harried and then 

 settled on both sides of the Channel. That their settlements in 

 Britain were greater and more abiding than their settlements 

 in Gaul was the result of many later causes. The Saxon of 

 Chichester owes his presence on British ground to the same 

 general effort to which the Saxon of Bayeux owed his presence 

 on Gaulish ground. The Saxon of Chichester keeps his Saxon 

 speech and from his land the Saxon name has not passed away. 

 The Saxon of Bayeux has for ages spoken the Latin tongue of 

 his neighbors, and while Sussex yet lives on the map, the 

 Otlingua Saxonica has given way to other names to the Bessin 

 and the department of Calvados. But each was planted in 

 his new home by the force of the same movement, the Saxon 

 wandering on the sea. And once planted in his new home, 

 whether in the island or on the mainland, he ceased to be a 

 wanderer by sea. He sat down and tilled the earth, and 

 he guarded the earth which he tilled by the arms no longer of 

 the seafarer but of the land warrior. Tlie change is not won- 

 derful. It has often happened in other lands, it has happened 

 again in the same land. To be seafaring folk or to be lands- 

 men is not always a question of what is bom in the blood. 

 Prosaic as it sounds, it is often the result of the circumstances 

 in which men find themselves. Seafaring Corinth planted at 

 one blow her twin colonies of Korkyra and Syracuse. Korkyra 

 on her island met her parent on the seas with fleets equal to her 

 own. Syracuse, planted in an island indeed, but an island that 

 was in truth a continent, took to the.ways of continents. Her 

 landfolk were driven to take to the sea to meet the attacks of 

 those Athenians who, two or three generations before, had been 

 no less landfolk themselves.^ So it was in the very land of 

 Bayeux. When the Northmen came in their ships, neither Saxon 

 nor Frank had ships to withstand them. Presently the sea- 

 faring Northmen, once settled in the land, changed into Norman 

 landfolk, foremost of warriors with horse and lance, but to 

 whom the horses of the wave had become simply means to 

 carry them safe from Ehegion to Messana, or from St. Valery to 

 Pevensey. 



Why, some one may ask, do I put forth again such very 

 obvious truths as these? Because they are of no small impor- 

 tance, if we are to discuss the latest theory of all as to the 

 origin of the English people. The only question is whether 

 that theory need be discussed at all : it is hard to argue against 

 that state of mind which, in the days when we learned logic, 

 we used to call ignoratio elenchi. But if not discussed, it must 

 be mentioned. Perhaps if this newest view of all had not 

 come up the other day, I might not have chosen this time to 

 talk about the views of Mr. Seebohm. But when M. Du Chaillu 

 puts forth his theory, it at once recalls Mr. Seebohm' s theory. 

 The two stand in a certain relation to one another: neither can 

 be fully taken in without the other. Both alike throw aside 

 the recorded facts of history in the interest of a theory, be it a 

 theory of the rotation of crops or a theory of the greatness of 

 "Vikings. Each theorist alike, possessed of a single thought, 

 cannot be got to stop and think what there is to be said on 

 the other side. M. Du Chaillu has put forth two very pretty 

 "volumes, with abundance of illustrations of Scandinavian 

 objects. Most of them, to be sure, will be found in various 

 Scandinavian books : still here they are, very many of them, and 

 looking very pretty. M. Du Chaillu has given us a great many 

 translations of sagas; but we have seen other translations of 

 sagas, and some of them have been made by sound scholars. 

 Criticism is hardly attempted. When the Scandinavian legend 

 can be tested by the authentic English history, when the saga 

 itself can be divided into the contemporary and trustworthy 

 verse and the later and untrustworthy prose, — work, all this, 

 which has been done over and over again by the scholar for more 

 than one nation, — M. Du Chaillu simply gives us the sagas again, 

 with comments now and then of amazing simplicity. The saga 



1 The great description comes in the sixth letter of the seventh book. 

 ■ Thucydides, vii. 21. 



of Harold Hardrada, the bits of genuine minstrelsy of the 

 eleventh century patched together by the prose of the thirteenth, 

 has been long ago thoroughly examined in its relations to the 

 English narratives; above all, to the precious piece of con- 

 temporary English minstrelsy preserved by Henry of Hunting- 

 don. It might have seemed hardly needful nowadays to prove 

 once more that the picture of the English army in the saga is 

 simply a fancy piece drawn from an English army of the 

 thirteenth century. Tliere are the English archers, the English 

 horsemen, horsemen too whose horses are sheeted in armor. If 

 any man doubts, he has nothing to do but to compare Snorro's 

 fancy piece with the living representation of a real English 

 army of the eleventh century in the contemporary tapestry of 

 Bayeux. There he will see that to the English of that day 

 the horse was simply a means to carry him to and from the- 

 place of battle, and that the clothing of horses in armor was a 

 practice as yet unknown to the Norman horsemen themselves. 

 Yet after all this, so often pointed out, M. Du Chaillu volun- 

 teers a little note to say that Snorro's version proves "that the 

 English, like their kinsmen, had horses." That we had horses, 

 no man save Procopius' ever doubted; but both Brihtnoth and 

 Harold got down from their horses when the work of battle 

 was to begin. 



It is hardly by an adversary who cannot wield the weapons of 

 criticism better than this that we shall be beaten out of the 

 belief that there is such a thing as an English people in 

 Britain. Perhaps, too, we shall not be the more inclined to 

 give up our national being when we see its earliest records 

 tossed aside with all the ignorant scorn of the eighteenth 

 century. The "Prankish and English chroniclers'' rank very 

 low in the eyes of M. Du Chaillu. We know exactly where we- 

 have got when we come to the old conventional talk about 

 "ignorant and bigoted men," "monkish scribes," and the 

 like. Among these monkish scribes we have to reckon Einhard 

 and Count Nithard, and our own literary ealdorman, Fabius 

 Patricius Quaestor Ethelwardas. Tlie odd thing is that, with 

 M. Du Chaillu, Franks and Saxons or English go together. He is 

 at least free from his countrymen's usual weakness of claiming 

 the Franks, their kings, their acts, and their writings, for their 

 own. As far as his theory can be made out, it seems to be 

 this: the Suiones of Tacitus are the Swedes, and the Suiones 

 had ships; so far no one need cavil. But we do not hear of the 

 Suiones or any other Scandinavian people doing any thing by 

 sea for several centuries. But, though we do not hear of it, 

 they must have been doing something. What was it that they 

 did? Now, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, centuries, we hear of 

 the Saxons doing a good deal by sea : therefore the name 

 "Saxones" must be a mistake of the Latin writers for 

 "Suiones." It was not Saxons, but Swedes, or at least 

 Scandinavians of some kind, who did all that is recorded of the 

 Saxons, and presumably of the .Angles and Jutes also, in Gaul, 

 Britain, or anywhere else. Tlie Angles and Saxons, therefore, 

 who have been hitherto thought to have settled in Britain in 

 the fifth and sixth centuries, are all a mistake. They were not 

 Anlges or Saxons at all, but Scandianvians of some kind. 

 Hengest and ^lle were simply the advanced guard of Hubba, 

 Sween, and Cnut. They could not have been Saxons, because, 

 when the Northmen came against the continental Saxons of 

 later times, they found no fleets to withstand them. 



The assumption that goes through all this is, that once a 

 seaman, ever a seaman; once a landsman, ever a landsman. 

 These' could not be seafaring Saxons in the fifth century, 

 because we do not hear of Saxon fleets in the eighth. On the 

 other hand, because the Suiones had ships in the days of 

 Tacitus, as they could not have left off using ships, it must 

 have been they who did the acts which are commonly attributed 

 to the Saxons. A good deal is involved in this last assmup- 

 tion: it is at least conceivable, and not at all unlike the later 

 history of Sweden, that the Suiones went on using their ships, 

 but used them somewhere else, and not on the cost of Gaul or 

 Britain. But of the grand assumption of all — the assumption 

 that the landsman can never become a seaman or the seaman a 

 ' Bell. [Gotth. iv. 20. 



