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The three maritime tribes of the North—The fleets of the Sueones—Expeditions of Saxons and Franks—Home of these tribes—The tribes of Germania not seafaring—Probable origin of the names Saxons and Franks.

Roman writers give us the names of three maritime tribes of the North, which were called by them Sueones, Saxones, and Franci. The first of these, which is the earliest mentioned, is thus described by Tacitus (circ. 57–117 A.D.):—

“Hence the States of the Sueones, situated in the ocean itself, are not only powerful on land, but also have mighty fleets. The shape of their ships is different, in that, having a prow at each end, they are always ready for running on to the beach. They are not worked by sails, nor are the oars fastened to the sides in regular order, but left loose as in some rivers, so that they can be shifted here or there as circumstances may require.”⁴

The word Sviar, which is constantly met with in the Sagas to denote the inhabitants of Svithjod (Sweden), or the country of which Upsala was the capital, corresponds somewhat to the name Sueones, and it is highly probable that in Sueones we have the root of Sviar and of Svithjod. The ships described by Tacitus are exactly like those which are described in this work as having been found in the North.

It stands to reason that the maritime power of the Sueones must have been the growth of centuries before the time of Tacitus, and from analogy of historical records we know that the fleets of powerful nations do not remain idle. Hence we must come to the conclusion that the Sueones navigated the sea long before the time of Tacitus, an hypothesis which is implied by the Eddas and Sagas as well as by the antiquities discovered.

That the Sueones, with such fleets, did not navigate westward further than Frisia is not credible, the more so that it was only necessary for them to follow the coast in order to come to the shores of Gaul, from which they could see Britain, and such maritime people must have had intercourse with the inhabitants of that island at that period; indeed, the objects of the earlier iron age discovered in Britain, which were until lately classed as Anglo-Roman, are identical with those of the country from which these people came, i.e., Scandinavia.

The Veneti, a tribe who inhabited Brittany, and whose power on the sea is described by Cæsar, were in all probability the advance-guard of the tribes of the North; their ships were built of oak, with iron nails, just as those of the Northmen; and the people of the country in which they settled were not seafaring.⁵ Moreover, the similarity of the name to that of the Venedi, who are conjecturally placed by Tacitus on the shores of the Baltic, and to the Vends, so frequently mentioned in the Sagas, can scarcely be regarded as a mere accident.

“The Veneti have a very great number of ships, with which they have been accustomed to sail to Britain, and excel the rest of the people in their knowledge and experience of nautical affairs; and as only a few ports lie scattered along that stormy and open sea, of which they are in possession, they hold as tributaries almost all those who have been accustomed to traffic in that sea. …”

“For their own ships were built and equipped in the following manner: Their ships were more flat-bottomed than our vessels, in order that they might be able more easily to guard against shallows and the ebbing of the tide; the prows were very much elevated, as also the sterns, so as to encounter heavy waves and storms. The vessels were built wholly of oak, so as to bear any violence or shock; the cross-benches, a foot in breadth, were fastened by iron spikes of the thickness of the thumb; the anchors were secured to iron chains, instead of to ropes; raw hides and thinly-dressed skins were used for sails, either on account of their want of canvas and ignorance of its use, or for this reason, which is the more likely, that they considered that such violent ocean storms and such strong winds could not be resisted, and such heavy vessels could not be conveniently managed by sails. The attack of our fleet on these vessels was of such a nature that the only advantage was in its swiftness and the power of its oars; in everything else, considering the situation and the fury of the storm, they had the advantage. For neither could our ships damage them by ramming (so strongly were they built), nor was a weapon easily made to reach them, owing to their height, and for the same reason they were not so easily held by grappling-irons. To this was added, that when the wind had begun to get strong, and they had driven before the gale, they could better weather the storm, and also more safely anchor among shallows, and, when left by the tide, need in no respect fear rocks and reefs, the dangers from all which things were greatly to be dreaded by our vessels.”

Roman writers after the time of Tacitus mention warlike and maritime expeditions by the Saxons and Franks. Their names do not occur in Tacitus, but it is not altogether improbable that these people, whom later writers mention as ravaging every country which they could enter by sea or land, are the people whom Tacitus knew as the Sueones.

The maritime power of the Sueones could not have totally disappeared in a century, a hypothesis which is borne out by the fact that after a lapse of seven centuries they are again mentioned in the time of Charlemagne; nor could the supremacy of the so-called Saxons and Franks on the sea have arisen in a day; it must have been the growth of even generations before the time of Tacitus.

Ptolemy (circ. A.D. 140) is the first writer who mentions the Saxons as inhabiting a territory north of the Elbe, on the neck of the Cimbric Chersonesus.⁶ They occupied but a small space, for between them and the Cimbri, at the northern extremity of the peninsula, he places ten other tribes, among them the Angli.

About a century after the time of Ptolemy, Franks and Saxons had already widely extended their expeditions at sea. Some of the former made an expedition from the Euxine, through the Mediterranean, plundered Syracuse, and returned without mishap across the great sea (A.D. circ. 280).⁷

“He (Probus) permitted the Bastarnæ, a Scythian race, who had submitted themselves to him, to settle in certain districts of Thrace which he allotted to them, and from thenceforth these people always lived under the laws and institutions of Rome. And there were certain Franks who had come to the Emperor, and had asked for land on which to settle. A part of them, however, revolted, and having obtained a large number of ships, caused disturbances throughout the whole of Greece, and having landed in Sicily and made an assault on Syracuse, they caused much slaughter there. They also landed in Libya, but were repulsed at the approach of the Carthaginian forces. Nevertheless, they managed to get back to their home unscathed.”

“Why should I tell again of the most remote nations of the Franks (of Francia), which were carried away not from those regions which the Romans had on a former occasion invaded, but from their own native territory, and the farthest shores of the land of the barbarians, and transported to the deserted parts of Gaul that they might promote the peace of the Roman Empire by their cultivation and its armies by their recruits?”⁸

“There came to mind the incredible daring and undeserved success of a handful of the captive Franks under the Emperor Probus. For they, having seized some ships, so far away as Pontus, having laid waste Greece and Asia, having landed and done some damage on several parts of the coast of Africa, actually took Syracuse, which was at one time so renowned for her naval ascendancy. Thereupon they accomplished a very long voyage and entered the Ocean at the point where it breaks through the land (the Straits of Gibraltar), and so by the result of their daring exploit showed that wherever ships can sail, nothing is closed to pirates in desperation.”⁹

In the time of Diocletian and Maximian these maritime tribes so harassed the coasts of Gaul and Britain that Maximian, in 286, was obliged to make Gesoriacum or Bononia (the present Boulogne) into a port for the Roman fleet, in order as far as possible to prevent their incursions.

“About this time (A.D. 287) Carausius, who, though of very humble origin, had, in the exercise of vigorous warfare, obtained a distinguished reputation, was appointed at Bononia to reduce to quiet the coast regions of Belgica and Armorica, which were overrun by the Franks and Saxons. But though many of the barbarians were captured, the whole of the booty was not handed over to the inhabitants of the province, nor sent to the commander-in-chief, and the barbarians were, moreover, deliberately allowed by him to come in, that he might capture them with their spoils as they passed through, and by this means enrich himself. On being condemned to death by Maximian, he seized on the sovereign command, and took possession of Britain.”¹⁰

Eutropius also records that the Saxons and others dwelt on the coasts of and among the marshes of the great sea, which no one could traverse, but the Emperor Valentinian (320–375) nevertheless conquered them.

The Emperor Julian calls the

“Franks and Saxons the most warlike of the tribes above the Rhine and the Western Sea.”¹¹

Ammianus Marcellinus (d. circ. 400 A.D.) writes:—

“At this time (middle of the 4th century), just as though the trumpets were sounding a challenge throughout all the Roman world, fierce nations were stirred up and began to burst forth from their territories. The Alamanni began to devastate Gallia and Rhætia; the Sarmatæ and Quadi Pannonia, the Picts and Saxons, Scots, and Attacotti constantly harassed the Britons.”¹²

“The Franks and the Saxons, who are coterminous with them, were ravaging the districts of Gallia wherever they could effect an entrance by sea or land, plundering and burning, and murdering all the prisoners they could take.”¹³

Claudianus asserts that the Saxons appeared even in the Orkneys:—

“The Orcades were moist from the slain Saxon.”¹⁴

These are but a few of many allusions to the same effect which might be quoted.

That the swarms of Sueones and so-called Saxons and Franks, seen on every sea of Europe, could have poured forth from a small country is not possible. Such fleets as they possessed could only have come from a country densely covered with oak forests. We must come to the conclusion that Sueones, Franks, and Saxons were seafaring tribes belonging to one people. The Roman writers did not seem to know the precise locality inhabited by these people.

It would appear that these tribes must have come from a country further eastward than the Roman provinces, and that as they came with ships, their home must have been on the shores of the Baltic, the Cattegat, and Norway; in fact, precisely the country which the numerous antiquities point to as inhabited by an extremely warlike and maritime race, which had great intercourse with the Greek and Roman world.

The dates given by the Greek and Roman writers of the maritime expeditions, invasions, and settlements of the so-called Saxons and Franks agree perfectly with the date of the objects found in the North, among which are numerous Roman coins, and remarkable objects of Roman and Greek art, which must have been procured either by the peaceful intercourse of trade or by war. To this very day thousands upon thousands of graves have been preserved in the North, belonging to the time of the invasions of these Northmen, and to an earlier period. From them no other inference can be drawn than that the country and islands of the Baltic were far more densely populated than any part of central and western Europe and Great Britain, since the number of these earlier graves in those countries is much smaller.

Every tumulus described by antiquaries as a Saxon or Frankish grave is the counterpart of a Northern grave, thus showing conclusively the common origin of the people.

Wherever graves of the same type are found in other countries we have the invariable testimony, either of the Roman or Greek writers of the Frankish and English Chronicles or of the Sagas, to show that the people of the North had been in the country at one time or another.

The conclusion is forced upon us that in time the North became over-populated, and an outlet was necessary for the spread of its people.

The story of the North is that of all countries whose inhabitants have spread and conquered, in order to find new fields for their energy and over-population; in fact, the very course the progenitors of the English-speaking peoples adopted in those days is precisely the one which has been followed by their descendants in England and other countries for the last three hundred years.

It is certain that the Franks could not have lived on the coast of Frisia, as they did later on, for we know that the country of the Rhine was held by the Romans, and, besides, as we have already seen, Julian refers to the Franks and Saxons as dwelling above the Rhine. Moreover, till they had to give up their conquests, no mention is made by the Romans of native seafaring tribes inhabiting the shores of their northern province, except the Veneti, and they would have certainly tried to subjugate the roving seamen that caused them so much trouble in their newly-acquired provinces if they had been within their reach.

From the Roman writers, who have been partially confirmed by archæology, we know that the tribes which inhabited the country to which they give the vague name of Germania were not seafaring people nor possessed of any civilisation. The invaders of Britain, of the Gallic and of the Mediterranean coasts could therefore not have been the German tribes referred to by the Roman writers, who, as we see from Julius Cæsar and other Roman historians, were very far from possessing the civilisation which we know, from the antiquities, to have existed in the North.

“Their whole life is devoted to hunting and warlike pursuits. From childhood they pay great attention to toil and hardiness; they bathe all together in the rivers, and wear skins or small reindeer garments, leaving the greater part of their bodies naked.”¹⁵

Tacitus, in recording the speech of Germanicus to his troops before the battle at Idistavisus, bears witness to the uncivilised character of the inhabitants of the country.

“The huge targets, the enormous spears of the barbarians could never be wielded against trunks of trees and thickets of underwood shooting up from the ground, like Roman swords and javelins, and armour fitting the body … the Germans had neither helmet nor coat of mail; their bucklers were not even strengthened with leather, but mere contextures of twigs and boards of no substance daubed over with paint. Their first rank was to a certain extent armed with pikes, the rest had only stakes burnt at the ends or short darts.”¹⁶

Now compare these descriptions with the magnificent archæology of the North of that period—as seen in these volumes—from which we learn that the tribes who inhabited the shores of the Baltic and the present Scandinavia had at the time the above was written reached a high degree of civilisation. We find in their graves and hoards, coins of the early Roman Empire not in isolated instances, but constantly and in large numbers, and deposited side by side with such objects as coats of mail, damascened swords and other examples of articles of highly artistic workmanship.

Three kinds of swords are often mentioned by the Northmen—the mœkir, the sverd, and the sax, while among the spears there is one called frakki, or frakka.

The double-edged sword was the one that was in use among the Romans, and they, seeing bodies of men carrying a weapon unlike theirs—single-edged, and called Sax—may have named them after it, and the Franks, in like manner, may have been called after their favourite weapon, the Frakki; but we see that neither the sax nor the frakki was confined to one tribe in the North. There is a Saxland in the Sagas—a small country situated east of the peninsula of Jutland, about the present Holstein—a land tributary to the Danish or Swedish Kings from the earliest times, but far from possessing the warlike archæology of the North, it appears to have held an insignificant place among the neighbouring tribes.

In the Bayeux tapestry the followers of William the Conqueror were called Franci, and they always have been recognised as coming from the North.

The very early finds prove that the Sax was not rare, for it occurs in different parts of the North and islands of the Baltic. The different swords and spears used were so common and so well known to everybody, that we have no special description of them in the Sagas, except of their ornamentation; but in the Saga of Grettir there is a passage which shows that the Sax was single-edged.

Gretti went to a farm in Iceland to slay the Bondi Thorbjorn and his son Arnor. We read—

“When Gretti saw that the young man was within reach he lifted his sax high into the air, and struck Arnor’s head with its back, so that his head was broken and he died. Thereupon he killed the father with his sax.”

Whatever may be the origin of local names employed by the Roman writers we must look to the North for the maritime tribes described by them; there we shall find the home of the earlier English people, to whose numerous warlike and ocean-loving instincts we owe the transformation which took place in Britain, and the glorious inheritance which they have left to their descendants, scattered over many parts of the world, in whom we recognise to this day many of the very same traits of character which their ancestors possessed.