But the Frank writers under the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties are neither the only nor the earliest authors who speak of the Hanoverians and Westphalians under the general name of _Saxon_. The Christianized Angles of England used the same denomination; and, as early as the middle of the eighth century, Beda mentions the Fresones, Rugini, Dani, Huni, _Antiqui Saxones_, Boructuarii.--_Hist. Eccles._ 5, 10. Again--the Boructuarii, descendants of the nearly exterminated Bructeri of Tacitus, and occupants of the country on the Lower Lippe, are said to have been reduced by the nation of the _Old Saxons_ (_a gente Antiquorum Saxonum_). In other records we find the epithet _Antiqui_ translated by the native word _eald_ (=_old_) and the formation of the compound _Altsaxones_--Gregorius Papa universo populo provinciæ _Altsaxonum_ (vita St. Boniface). Lastly, the Anglo-Saxon writers of England use the term _Eald-Seaxan_ (=_Old-Saxon_). And this form is current amongst the scholars of the present time; who call the language of the _Heliand_, of the so-called _Carolinian Psalms_ and of _Hildebrant and Hathubrant_, the _Old_-Saxon, in contradistinction to the _Anglo_-Saxon of Alfred, Cædmon, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The authority of the Anglo-Saxons themselves justifies this compound; yet it is by no means unexceptionable. Many a writer has acquiesced in the notion that the Old-Saxon was neither more nor less than the Anglo-Saxon in a continental locality, and the Anglo-Saxon but the Old-Saxon transplanted into England. Again--the Old-Saxons have been considered as men who struck, as with a two-edged sword, at Britain on the one side, and at Upper Saxony on the other, so that the Saxons of Leipsic and the Saxons of London are common daughters of one parent--the Saxons of Westphalia. The exact relations, however, to the Old-Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons seem to have been as follows:-- The so-called Old-Saxon is the old _Westphalian_-- The so-called Anglo-Saxon the old _Hanoverian_ population. Their languages were sufficient alike to be mutually intelligible, and after the conversion of the Angles of England, who became Christianized about A.D. 600, the extension of their own creed to the still Pagan Saxons of the Continent became one of the great duties to the bishops and missionaries of Britain; who, although themselves of Hanoverian rather than Westphalian extraction, looked upon the whole stock at large as their parentage, and called their cousins (so to say) in Westphalia, and their brothers in Hanover, by the collective term _Old-Saxon_. All the Angles, then, of the _Saxonia_ of the Frank and British writers of the eighth century were Saxon, though all the Saxons were not Angle. Eastphalia, the division which must have been the most _Angle_, reached as far as the Elbe.