The English People
Mr. Craufurd, the ethnologist, has, in these few sentences, described the people of England: “They are,” he tells us, “among the most mixed people in the world: but the admixtures always having been of high order, no deterioration has resulted. Teutonic invasions appear to have been early made on the coasts of Britain, and the people who offered so brave a resistance to Cæsar were probably German settlers. The Romans, for four centuries, occupied all the best parts of the land, leaving the remains of the primitive peoples in the sterile and mountainous districts, which it would have been difficult to subdue, and unprofitable to keep in subjugation. The Romans, accompanied by few women, necessarily intermarried with the British. After them came the Teutonic Jutes, Saxons, Angles, Frisians, Danes, and Norwegians—the latter came over by mere boatloads; but in the course of several generations they attained, by their superior valour—for in number they never approached that of the original inhabitants—to the position of invaders, and spread their own language and institutions over the land. The Normans came next, but they were too few in number to overthrow the Saxon element; and all they have accomplished has been to add considerably to the Saxon vocabulary. We are not then, as a race, exclusively Britons, or exclusively Saxon, but a great deal more of the former than the latter.”