This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some way a reconstruction of England. The wilder sort of fiction dealing with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate raids as “the coming of the English.” We must, of course, neglect rhetoric of that kind. But it is worth while admitting a moment’s digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing approaching evidence all this academic guess-work has been raised. The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate raids which descended upon the eastern and southern river mouths and beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that these raids cut off southern and eastern Britain from the rest of civilisation. Of contemporary evidence there is nothing for more than 150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the island by these raids, and a couple of fragmentary sentences written perhaps by contemporaries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble. We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they were already severe before Britain was cut off. We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxiliary Troops within the Empire or no. We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex spoke a Teutonic language before the pirate raids or no. We do not know whether a Christian Church was sufficiently established in those belts for the raids to have had an opportunity of “destroying” such a Church. We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or did not suffer from the invasions. We have, as almost the sole instrument of historical analysis for a full 150 years, nothing but inference and the consideration of what is physically possible and physically impossible in the various theories that have been put forward.