In Britain, the course of events was different. The Northmen, men of the sea, and accustomed to life in the open air, had no sympathies with the Celts, and utterly disdained what remained of Roman civilisation; slaying or driving out the people, and burning and destroying the Roman buildings, which, in consequence, are in England fragmentary, and in most cases only preserved by having been covered up with earth or incorporated into later structures. The Roman works were mostly on too large a scale for the wants of new settlers, and even where these occupied the Roman towns they cared not to restore or complete the walls, but buried what remained of them in high earthen banks, upon which they pitched their palisades, and within which they threw up their moated citadels. The Northmen respected nothing, adopted nothing. Their earliest mission was one of violence and destruction. They appear, in the south and east at least, in a large measure to have slain and driven out the people of the land, and to have abolished such institutions as they possessed. But not the less did they carry with them the seeds of other institutions of a far more vigorous and very healthful character. Whether Saxons, Angles, or Jutes, though landing on the shores of Britain in quite independent parties, they had the substance of their speech, their customs, and their gods in common. They had the same familiarity with the sea, the same indisposition to occupy Roman buildings, the same absence of all sympathy with the native Britons. If they still held most of their lands in common, the house and the homestead were already private property. Their family ties were strong, as is shown in the nomenclature of their villages. As they conquered, they settled, and practised agriculture, and as they embraced Christianity they gradually established those divisions, civil and ecclesiastical, sokes and rapes, tythings, hundreds, wapentakes, and parishes, which still remain to attest the respect to which they had attained for law and order, for the rights of private property, and their capacity for self-government. Much akin to, and before long to be incorporated into the English nation, were the Norsemen from the seaboard country north of the Elbe, the Danes of English history and of local tradition, who in the eighth century played the part of the Saxons in the fifth. They scoured the same seas, and harassed the Saxons as the Saxons had harassed the Britons, only the invaders and the invaded being, generally, of the same blood, finally coalesced, and the distinctions between them became well-nigh effaced; still, for three centuries, the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, the Danish name was the terror of the British Isles. They infested every strand, anchored in every bay, ascended every river, penetrated and laid waste the interior of the country.