These Anglo-Saxons--let us call them so, for that will include both the covering names--were great sea-farers, rovers, pirates. They went on marauding expeditions in their ships just as the Phœnicians had gone marauding long before and just as the Northmen, the Vikings, went a little later. It may be they were invited by the Britons; it may be they came without invitation, as their pirate fleet went down along the east coast of Britain. If they were invited, the result was very much like the result of the invitation which we saw that the Count of Africa gave to the Vandals. The Vandals came and helped him; but then they helped themselves also so liberally that they drove him out of his own possessions. The Anglo-Saxons did just the same by the Britons. They helped them: they drove back the Caledonians: but then they stayed: they drove out the Britons: they established themselves in the island: they changed Britain, the land of the Britons, into England, the land of the Angles. At least, they made that change over much of the island. We have noted its geography in an earlier chapter, and saw that the east and the south are less mountainous and therefore less strong for defence against an invader, than the west and north. So it was all down the East of England and along the southern part that the Anglo-Saxons settled. The Britons went back into the hills of Devon and Cornwall, of Wales and of Cumberland. We have to picture to ourselves all the eastern and southern shores of Britain and the western coast of the Continent of Europe as very liable to the attack of one or other of the sea-rovers at this time, and, as a consequence of different tribes of these rovers arriving {40} in strength in different parts of our island, we find it divided into three different main kingdoms--in the north the kingdom of Northumbria, which reached up as far as the Firth of Forth; in the south the kingdom of Wessex, or the West Saxons; and between the two the kingdom of Marcia, or Mercia, which meant, originally, the kingdom of the Marches--of the "mark" or boundary between the English and the Britons. The Briton had become Romanised--that is to say had adopted Roman ways of thought and living, and had lived under Roman law, while the legions were there. Of course, since the legions formed permanent encampments--practically towns--as we have seen, all the Romans and the Roman influence did not leave when the soldiers and the governors, appointed by Rome, went. The Britons had the Roman way of talking of these English as "barbarians"--men outside the pale.