LIST OF MAPS. I. NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE IN THE FOURTH CENTURY To face page 17 2. BRITAIN AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY 3. NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE AT THE END OF THE NINTH CENTURY · 4. BRITAIN IN THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES THE CONFESSOR, 5. BRITAIN AT THE DEATH OF EDWARD KINGDOMS 39 134 144 280 OLD ENGLISH HISTORY FOR CHILDREN. CHAPTER I. WHO FIRST LIVED IN BRITAIN. THE Country in which we live is called England, that is to say, the land of the English. But it was not always called England, because there were not always Englishmen living in it. The old name of the land was Britain. And we still call the whole island in which we live Great Britain, of which England is the southern part and Scotland the northern. We call it Great Britain, because there is another country also called Britain, namely, the north-western corner of Gaul; but this last we now generally call Brittany. The two names, however, are really the same, and both are called in Latin Britannia. In the old days then, when the land was called only Britain, Englishmen had not yet begun to live in it. Our forefathers then lived in other lands, and had not yet come into the land where we now live ; but there was an England even then, namely the land in which Englishmen then lived. If you look in a map of Denmark or of Northern Germany, you will see on the Baltic Sea a little land called Angeln; that is the same name as England. I do not mean that all our forefathers came out of that one little land of Angeln; but they all came from that part of the world, from the lands near the mouth of the Elbe, and that one little land has kept the English name to this day. B |