86 M. L. ROUSE, B.L., ON THE PEDIGREE OF THE NATIONS, 



Since pedigree 1 is introduced at a date 80 years earlier than 

 any other in the Chronicle, and this was certainly not entered 

 up in Hengist's own time, from the adverse way in which it 

 sums up his behaviour, and could hardly have been re.oularly 

 kept, being a West Saxon record, until government in Wessex 

 became settled in 534 a.d., we may w^ell think that some of the 

 links in Hengist's pedigree had meanwhile been lost ; yet it is 

 not impossible, even if we take this pedigree as w^e find it, to 

 bring Woden into the same period as we have just done, if we 

 suppose that each son in the choin was on an average born 

 when his fatlier was forty-eight years old. 



Xow it is in 287 a.d., or 24 years after the close of 

 our period, that the first notice of the Saxons occurs in any 

 known Latin or Greek author ; and we then learn that in that 

 year Carausius, who had been appointed admiral of the Eoman 

 fleet to guard the shores of Belgic Gaul and Armoriea* against 

 raids made by them and the Fraidvs, being accused by the 

 Emperor Alaximian of enriching himself instead of the treasury 

 with recovered booty, saved himself by seizing the government 

 of Britain and proclaiming himself emperor there.f It must 

 have been about a generation before his time that the Saxons 

 reached the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, and thus found 

 harV)ours whence they could sail forth and prey upon the coasts 

 of Northern France and Brittany ; and this brings us to the 

 period when, as we have just seen, Woden was flourishing. 

 Now he must have been made a demigod both in England and 

 Germany for some great exploits ; and the fact that most of the 

 pedigrees are traced back to him and no further shows that his 

 life began a fresh era in the history of his nation ; w^e may there- 

 fore conclude beyond doubt that it was he who led the Saxons 

 in their warlike migration from their first home beyond the 

 Caucasus across Scythia and into Northern Germany. 



TiRAS. 



The descendants of Tiras and Javan, as I hope to show, 

 formed the remaining elements in the population of Southern 

 Europe down to the first Moslem invasion, which infused 

 Arabian and Libyan blood into many districts of Spain and into 

 the islands of the Mediterranean Sea ; and I shall deal with 

 Tiras first, although he was the younger brother, because his 



* Later on called Brittany. 



t Entro))ius, /Jrev. Ilist. Rojn., ix, 21 ; Orosius, vii, 25 : cp. Sext. 

 Aurel. Victor JJe Vir. 111. c. 78, and Epit., c. 39. 



