Germany. The language of science, of business, and of conversation, which had been introduced by the Romans, was lost in the general desolation. A sufficient number of Latin or Celtic words might be assumed by the Germans, to express their new wants and ideas;[1] but those illiterate Pagans preserved and established the use of their national dialect.[2] Almost every name, conspicuous either in the church or state, reveals its Teutonic origin;[3] and the geography of England was universally inscribed with foreign characters and appellations. The example of a revolution, so rapid and so complete, may not easily be found; but it will excite a probable suspicion that the arts of Rome were less deeply rooted in Britain than in Gaul or Spain; and that the native rudeness of the country and its inhabitants was covered by a thin varnish of Italian manners.
Servitude This strange alteration has persuaded historians, and even philosophers, that the provincials of Britain were totally exterminated; and that the vacant land was again peopled by the perpetual influx and rapid increase of the German colonies. Three hundred thousand Saxons are said to have obeyed the summons of Hengist;[4] the entire emigration of the Angles was attested, in the age of Bede, by the solitude of their native country;[5] and our experience has shown the free propagation of the human race, if they are cast on a fruitful wilderness, where their steps are unconfined and their subsistence is plentiful. The Saxon kingdoms displayed the face of recent discovery and cultivation; the towns were small, the villages were distant; the husbandry was languid and unskilful; four sheep were equivalent to an acre of the best land;[6] an ample space of wood and morass- ↑ Dr. Johnson affirms that few English words are of British extraction. Mr. Whitaker, who understands the British language, has discovered more than three thousand, and actually produces a long and various catalogue (vol. ii. p. 235-329). It is possible, indeed, that many of these words may have been imported from the Latin or Saxon into the native idiom of Britain.
- ↑ In the beginning of the seventh century, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons mutually understood each other's language, which was derived from the same Teutonic root (Bede, l. i. c. 25, p. 60).
- ↑ After the first generation of Italian, or Scottish, missionaries, the dignities of the church were filled with Saxon proselytes.
- ↑ Carte's History of England, vol. i. p. 195. He quotes the British historians; but I much fear that Jeffrey of Monmouth (l. vi. c. 15) is his only witness.
- ↑ Bede, Hist. Ecclesiast. l. i. c. 15, p. 52. The fact is probable and well attested; yet such was the loose intermixture of the German tribes that we find, in a subsequent period, the law of the Angli and Warini of Germany (Lindenbrog. Codex, p. 479-486).
- ↑ See Dr. Henry's useful and laborious History of Great Britain, vol. ii. p. 388.
