General Notes

Hengest and Horsa, who led the Saxon bands who invaded England in 446.William of Malmesbury says that they were grandsons of the ancient Woden,from whom almost all the royal families of these barbarous nations deducetheir origin, and to whom the nations of the Angles, fondly deifying him,have consecrated the fourth day of the week Wodens-day, and the sixth dayunto his wife Frea. For the fatherland of the English race we must lookfar away from England itself. Three tribes of Germany, Angles, Saxons andJutes, by whom Britain was subdued, seem originally to have constitutedbut one nation, speaking the same language, and ruled by monarchs who allclaimed descent from the deified monarch of the Teutons, Woden or Odin.Jutes with their neighbors the Angles dwelt in the peninsula of Jutland,which parts the Baltic from the North Sea. In the adjoining Holsteinthere is still a district called Anglen. Hengest and Horsa had gone toEngland at the request of the British King Vortigern to help him in hisbattles with the Picts. They were at first given the Island of Thanet asa home, but soon quarreled with their British allies, and graduallypossessed themselves of what became the Kingdom of Kent. In 455 the SaxonChronicle records a battle between Hengest and Horsa and Vortigen, inwhich Horsa was killed, and thenceforth Hengest reigned in Kent until hisdeath in 488.