AND ITS CONNECTION WITH THE GREAT ANGLO-SAXON AND DANISH HOARD, DISCOVERED AT CUERDALE, IN 1840. HAROLD--(On the morn of the battle of Senlac or Hastings)--Our guardsmen have slept well since we came in? LEOFWIN.-- * * They are up again And chanting that old song of Brunanburg, Where England conquer'd. _Tennyson's Harold._ Upwards of three centuries had elapsed since the departure of the Roman legions from Britain, and the presumedly first regularly organised invasion of the island by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, when a new enemy of the same Teutonic blood and language appeared upon her shores. The country had been but partially conquered by the first Teutonic invaders. Picts and Scots held their own in Ireland and that portion of Great Britain to the north of the estuaries of the Clyde and the Forth. The Britons were not only masters in old Cornwall and in a more extended territory than is now included in the present principality of Wales, but they remained dominant in Strathclyde and Cumberland, which comprised the lands on the western side of the island between the Clyde estuary and Morecambe Bay. Christianity had become the recognised religious faith of both the Britons and the Teutons, but the newly arrived kinsmen of the latter were still worshippers of Odin, and marched to battle with his sacred "totem" or cognizance, the "swart raven" emblazoned on their banners. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the date 787, says--"This year king Bertric took to wife Eadburga, King Offa's daughter; and in his days first came three ships of Northmen, out of Hœretha-land [Denmark.] And then the reve rode to the place, and would have driven them to the king's town, because he knew not who they were: and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men which sought the land of the English nation." These three ships landed in Dorsetshire, and the gerefa or reve, named Beaduheard, of Dorchester, supposed them to be contraband traders rather than pirates. This mistake cost him his life, as well as the lives of the whole of his retinue. The conflicts which followed for many years afterwards between these heathen pirates and their Christianised kinsmen were characterised by deeds of remorseless atrocity as well as of indomitable valour. Truly, every now relatively civilized nation has had to pass through what may not be inaptly termed its Bashi-Bazouk stage of culture before from it evolved its present more highly developed intellectual and moral human features. Mr. Jno. R. Green ("Short History of the English People,") sums up the more prominent characteristics of this internecine strife as follows:--