Welsh fled like fire. These events occupy a quarter of a century. While
they are going on, the Roman Emperor, as we have mentioned upon
indubitable authority, receives an auxiliary force of twelve thousand
men from Britain. We cannot rely upon narratives that tell us of _the_
king of the Britons, when we learn from no suspicious sources that the
land was governed by many separate chiefs; and which represent a petty
band of fugitives as gaining mighty triumphs for a great ruler, and then
subduing him themselves in a wonderfully short time.

The pretensions of Hengist and Horsa to be the immediate descendants of
Woden would seem to imply their mythical origin. But many Saxon chiefs
of undoubted reality rested their pretensions upon a similar genealogy.
The myth was as flattering to the Anglo-Saxon pride of descent as the
corresponding myth that the ancient inhabitants of the island were
descended from the Trojan Brute was acceptable to the British race. But
amid much of fable there is the undoubted fact that Germanic tribes were
gradually possessing themselves of the fairest parts of Britain--a
progressive usurpation, far different from a sudden conquest. Amid the
wreck of the social institutions left by Rome, when all that remained of
a governing power was centred in the towns, it may be readily conceived
that the rich districts of the eastern and southern coasts would be
eagerly peopled by new settlers, whose bond of society was founded upon
the occupation of the land; and who, extending the area of their
occupation, would eventually come into hostile conflict with the
previous possessors.

For a century and a half a thick darkness seems to overspread the
history of our country. In the Anglo-Saxon writers we can trace little,
with any distinctness, beyond the brief and monotonous records of
victories and slaughters. Hengist and Æsc slew four troops of Britons