Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/58

to the Christian era Britain was partly inhabited by communities speaking well-differentiated varieties of that form of Aryan known as Celtic; we presume, on fairly convincing grounds, that these communities came here from the Continent during the course of the millennium preceding the Christian era; we conjecture, on grounds which are really of the vaguest, that they found in possession communities which did not speak any variety of Aryan. We know that in the course of the millennium following the Christian era there was a steady influx from the Continent of well-differentiated varieties of Teutonic Aryans; that the fifth and sixth centuries and ninth and tenth centuries A.D. respectively were marked by very considerable invasions, in the first instance of Continental, in the second of Scandinavian Teutons. We know that since that time the population of these islands has not been subjected to any considerable modification, for we cannot regard the Norman Conquest as at all comparable in its effect upon our population to either the Danish incursions of the ninth and tenth centuries, or to Anglo-Saxon incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries. Comparing the three main streams of Continental immigration, pre-Christian Celtic, post-Christian fifth-century Low-German, and ninth-tenth century Scandinavian, we have strong grounds for believing that the Celts brought their women with them to a greater extent than was the case with the Low-Germans, and certainly to a far greater extent than was the case with the Danes. So far then as race be taken in a purely physical sense, the postChristian German invasions are likely to have had a more mixed outcome than the pre-Christian Celtic; more men of German blood would have to seek alien wives, Celtic or pre-Celtic, than did the first Celtic immigrants. On the other hand, even in the invasion least marked by the presence of women, that of the Scandinavians, they were present in quite sufficient number to allow for the continuance of the invading community with comparatively