waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is
their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that
live on the pillage of the world!"

[Sidenote: Britain]

Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and
they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of
the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy
of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear
as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island
was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year
before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
and a century after Cæsar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its
conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over
the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the Roman
frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work