The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons--Their Village Communities--Larger Combinations, Gradations of Rank--Morality and Religion--Hengist and Horsa found the Kingdom of Kent--The Kingdoms of Sussex, Wessex and Essex--The Anglian Kingdoms--Mercia--The Welsh--Gregory and St. Augustine--Augustine and Kent--Conversion of Northumbria--England becomes Christian--The Greatness of Mercia--King Offa. After the departure of the Romans, the Britons were left to contend as best they could against the hordes of invaders who pressed upon them from the north, and on the eastern coast from overseas. The Saxons reappeared, and were accompanied by the kindred nations known as the Jutes and Angles. It is from this last nation that England takes her name, the land of the Angles, or English, and we shall soon cease to talk of Britain. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons formed a confederacy of tribes dwelling at the mouth of the Elbe, in the district known now-a-days as Schleswig-Holstein. They were of German race, so that the well-known description of that country and people given by Tacitus in the _Germania_ applies to them, and is, moreover, confirmed in a remarkable way by what we know of their institutions and customs after they had conquered Britain. Perhaps the most striking feature of the society of our forefathers is that they had no towns. They dwelt in village communities, as the rural inhabitants of India do at the present day, and we are able from other sources to form a very exact idea of the way in which these communities were constituted. The land belonged to the whole of the little society, and the district occupied by it was known as the Mark. In the centre was the village. Beyond the village lay the arable land, in which each member of the village had a share, but this he could only cultivate in the same way as his neighbours. These shares were frequently redistributed, so that no man might permanently hold a more fertile portion than his neighbour, and the right to leave property by will was strictly limited. The head man of the village was elected by the community. Beyond the village came the common pasture land, into which the cattle of the community were turned to feed as they pleased; and farther still came the waste or belt of woodland or moor which separated one village from the next.