The fertile fields which long before had merited the praises of the first Roman victor, must have offered attractions enough to induce wandering Saxons and Angles to desert the marshes and islands of the Elbe, and to call Frisian adventurers over from the sands and salt-pools of their home. If in the middle of the fifth century Saxons had established regular settlements at Bayeux[19]; if even before this time the country about Grannona bore the name of Littus Saxonicum[20], we may easily believe that at still earlier periods other Saxons had found over the intervening ocean a way less dangerous and tedious than a march through the territories of jealous or hostile neighbours, or even than a coasting voyage along barbarous shores defended by a yet more barbarous population. A north-east wind would, almost without effort of their own, have carried their ships from Hêlgoland and the islands of the Elbe, or from Silt and Romsey[21], to the Wash and the coast of Norfolk. There seems then every probability that bodies more or less numerous, of coast-Germans, perhaps actually of Saxons and Angles, had colonized the eastern shores of England long before the time generally assumed for their advent[22]. The very exigencies of military service had rendered this island familiar to the nations of the continent: Batavi, under their own national chieftains, had earned a share of the Roman glory, and why not of the Roman land, in Britain[23]? The policy of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, at the successful close of the Marcomannic war, had transplanted to Britain multitudes of Germans, to serve at once as instruments of Roman power and as hostages for their countrymen on the frontier of the empire[24]. The remnants of this once powerful confederation cannot but have left long and lasting traces of their settlement among us; nor can it be considered at all improbable that Carausius, when in the year 287, he raised the standard of revolt in Britain, calculated upon the assistance of the Germans in this country, as well as that of their allies and brethren on the continent[25]. Nineteen years later the death of Constantius delivered the dignity of Caesar to his son Constantine: he was solemnly elected to that dignity in Britain, and among his supporters was Crocus, or as some read Erocus, an Alamannic king who had accompanied his father from Germany[26]. Still later, under Valentinian, we find an auxiliary force of Alamanni serving with the Roman legions here. Footnote 19: Saxones Baiocassini. Greg. Turon. v. 27; x. 9. Footnote 20: _Grannona in littore Saxonico._ Notit. Imp. Occid. c. 86. Du Chesne Hist. i. p. 3. The Tótingas, who have left their name to Tooting in Surrey, are recorded also at Tótingahám in the county of Boulogne. Leo, Rectitudines singularum personarum, p. 26. Footnote 21: