The Angle and Saxon seafarers from the region we now know as Denmark and Hanover had infested the shores of Britain for two centuries or more before the coming of Hengist and Horsa which Bede here describes. The withdrawal of the Roman garrisons about the year 410 left the Britons at the mercy of the wilder Picts and Scots of the north and west, and as a last resort King Vortigern decided to call in the Saxons to aid in his campaign of defense. Such, at least, is the story related by Gildas, a Romanized British chronicler who wrote about the year 560, and this was the view adopted by Bede. Recent writers, as Mr. James H. Ramsay in his _Foundations of England_, are inclined to cast serious doubts upon the story because it seems hardly probable that any king would have taken so foolish a step as that attributed to Vortigern.[70] At any rate, whether by invitation or for pure love of seafaring adventure, certain it is that the Saxons and Angles made their appearance at the little island of Thanet, on the coast of Kent, and found the country so much to their liking that they chose to remain rather than return to the over-populated shores of the Baltic. There are many reasons for believing that people of Germanic stock had been settled more or less permanently in Britain long before the traditional invasion of Hengist and Horsa. Yet we are justified in thinking of this interesting expedition as, for all practical purposes, the beginning of the long and stubborn struggle of Germans to possess the fruitful British isle. While Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Vandals and Lombards were breaking across the Rhine-Danube frontier and finding new homes in the territories of the Roman Empire, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the farther north were led by their seafaring instincts to make their great movement, not by land, but by water, and into a country which the Romans had a good while before been obliged to abandon. There they were free to develop their own peculiar Germanic life and institutions, for the most part without undergoing the changes which settlement among the Romans produced in the case of the tribes whose migrations were towards the Mediterranean. Source--Baeda, _Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum_ [Bede, "Ecclesiastical History of the English People"], Bk. I., Chaps. 14-15. Translated by J. A. Giles (London, 1847), pp. 23-25. [Sidenote: The Britons decide to call in the Saxons] They consulted what was to be done,[71] and where they should seek assistance to prevent or repel the cruel and frequent incursions of the northern nations. And they all agreed with their king, Vortigern, to call over to their aid, from the parts beyond the sea, the Saxon nation; which, as the outcome still more plainly showed, appears to have been done by the inspiration of our Lord Himself, that evil might fall upon them for their wicked deeds. [Sidenote: The Saxons settle in the island]