Jutes

They gradually spread across the island, building towns and cities, including London.

After the Romans left Britain in the year 411, different groups from Northern Europe, famously the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, settled in parts of Britain.

They established several different kingdoms, including the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia.

These kingdoms were often rivals.

Although the borders of the kingdom of England were different from the modern country today.

And the rulers of these kingdoms became known as Anglo-Saxons.

The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were Anglo-Saxons.

England was not isolated from the rest of Europe though.

But the empire finally retired from the island of Britain.

An obscure interval of troubled independence succeeded, and in the middle of the century, Jutes, Saxons, and Angles were beginning their conquests.

Yet the empire, as has been said in the opinion and feeling of men, still lasted under these strange conditions.

The Teutonic invaders for the most part professed to acknowledge its existence and authority, to respect its laws, though claiming to be themselves exempt from them, to serve it after their own manner as its officers and soldiers, to call themselves its guests or its confederates, even in the possessions which they had either seized or acquired by a forced sale.

No one great victory, as so often on the continent, saved the land or delivered it to a new master.

The conquerors of Britain, the founders of the English people, came straight across the sea from one small corner in the wilderness of nations, where three obscure tribes, unheeded at the time when the world was full of the name and terror of Goths and Huns, were loosely united in one of the leagues common at the time among the barbarians.

Jutes, Angles, and a tribe of old Saxons whose fathers had moved over Europe from east to west till they were stopped by the broad mouth of the Elbe and by the bleak and dreary shores of the North Sea, had learned that the ocean, though very terrible, offered a useful war path to the warriors who dared to trust it.

According to our earliest traditions, between 443 and 449, a band of these rovers hovering about the coast, as many other bands had for many years done before them, were invited, amid the anarchy left in Britain by the retirement of the Roman legions, to help Romanized Britons against their wilder kinsfolk.

By the early fifth century, Rome was retreating, leaving a vacuum for new settlers.

Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, migrated from what is now Germany and Denmark.

They brought Old English, which gradually eclipsed Brittonic in the south and east of England.

But Latin didn't disappear entirely.

in the jerusalem chamber of westminster abbey there is a thirteenth-century altar-piece of this kind and you can see the strips of vellum that were used to cover the joins of the different pieces of wood forming the panel beneath the layer of plaster which has now to a great extent peeled off the people liked to see their old testament stories and the stories from the life of christ painted over and over again they had become fond of the versions of the tales which they had known and seen painted when they were young and did not wish them changed so that the range of subjects was not large the same were repeated and because of the painter's fear of making mistakes it was natural that the same figures should be repeated too thus whatever the subject pictured a tradition was formed in each locality for the grouping and general arrangement of the figures and the most authoritative tradition for such typical groupings was preserved in constantinople or byzantium from which city the byzantine school of painting takes its name before twelve hundred byzantium had been a centre of residence and the civilizing influence of trade for eighteen centuries It had been the capital of the Roman Empire, and less civilized peoples from the north had never conquered the town, destroying the Greek and Roman traditions, as happened elsewhere in Europe.

You have read how the Romans had to withdraw their armies from England to defend Rome against the attacks of the Goths from the north, and then how Britain was settled by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes, who destroyed most of the Roman civilization.

A similar, though much less complete, destruction took place in Italy a little later, when Goths and Lombards, who were remotely akin to the Angles and Saxons, overwhelmed Roman culture.

But next to Constantinople, Rome had the best continuous tradition of art, for the fine monuments of the great imperial days still existed in the city.