The Angles were something more definite; they held that corner of land where the neck of Denmark joins the mainland of Germany. This we know for certain. There was a considerable immigration of them; enough to make their departure noticeable in the sparsely populated heaths of their district, and to make Bede record the traveler’s tale that their barren country still looked “depopulated.” How many boatloads of them, however, may have come, we have of course no sort of record: we only know from our common sense that the number must have been insignificant compared with the total free and slave population of a rich Roman province. Their chiefs got a hold of the land far above the Thames Estuary, in scattered spots all up the east coast of Britain, as far as the Firth of Forth. There are no other authorities. There is no other evidence save St. Gildas, a contemporary and—two hundred years after him, _three_ hundred after the first event—Bede. A mass of legend and worse nonsense called the _Historia Brittonum_ exists indeed for those who consult it—but it has no relation to historical science nor any claim to rank as evidence. As we have it, it is centuries late, and it need not concern serious history. Even for the existence of Arthur—to which it is the principal witness—popular legend is a much better guide. As to the original dates of the various statements in the _Historia Brittonum_, those dates are guesswork. The legendary narrative as a whole, though very ancient in its roots, dates only from a period subsequent to Charlemagne, much more than a century later than Bede and a time far less cultured. The life of St. Germanus, who came and preached in Britain after the Roman legions had left, is contemporary, and deals with events sixty years before St. Gildas’ birth. It would be valuable if it told us anything about the Pirate settlements on the coast—whether these were but the confirmation of older Roman Saxon garrisons or Roman agricultural colonies or what—but it tells us nothing about them. We know that St. Germanus dealt in a military capacity with “Picts and Scots”—an ordinary barbarian trouble—but we have no hint at Saxon settlements. St. Germanus was last in Britain in 447, and it is good negative evidence that we hear nothing during that visit of any real trouble from the Saxon pirates who at that very time might be imagined, if legend were to be trusted, to be establishing their power in Kent.