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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Now tell me what you are thinking of doing. Maybe I can advise you, being an adventurer by choice, as it seems you must be by need. But first I will offer you both a share in our cruise, if you will turn viking and go the way of Hengist and Horsa, your forbears. Atheling and thane's son you will be to us still, if you have to take an oar now and then."
About the middle of the fifth century, the unwarlike Vortigern, then king of Britain, embraced the fatal resolution of requesting these hardy warriors to deliver him from the harassing inroads of the Picts and Scots; and the expedition of Hengist and Horsa was the consequence.
Thus Italian, Spanish, and French were originally different dialects of the vulgar Latin, slightly modified by the mingling of the Roman soldiers with the natives of the conquered provinces. Brutus, Arthur, Hengist, Horsa, Edward the Confessor, and William of Normandy are all alike set down as English heroes.
We Englishmen undoubtedly derive a large portion of our nautical spirit from our Saxon ancestors, the first bands of whom came to the shores of our tight little island under those sea-rovers known as Hengist and Horsa, invited by the helpless Britons to defend them from the attacks of the savage Picts and Scots.
After they had been conquered and colonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebooters began to look for settlements, on their part, farther south. One horde, led, as the legend veraciously assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet; another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the command of a certain dubious Ælle, came to shore on the spit of Selsea.
Their solid Pavement is a Picture of the Sense; they walk on the bosom of Nothing, blank Time is behind them and before them. Or fanciest thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yonder, with spurs on its heels and feather in its crown, is but of To-day, without a Yesterday or a To-morrow; and had not rather its Ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa overran thy Island?
In forty-five years after Hengist and Horsa landed, Cerdic with a more formidable band had taken possession of a large part of the southern coast, and pushed his way to Winchester and founded the kingdom of Wessex. But the work of conquest was slow. It took seventy years for the Saxons to become masters of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, and Wessex.
As Vetta and Victis correspond to the names of the father and grandfather of Hengist and Horsa, it is difficult to resist the suggestion that in this great Cat Stane, that is, Battle Stone, we have the monument set up by the Romano-Britons, in triumph over the fallen chief of the Saxon marauders.
But in the year 597, that famous landmark in the Christianizing of Saxon England, Augustine, landed if Bede may be trusted for a topographical detail of this character on the island of Ebbsfleet, where Hengist and Horsa had previously found a haven for their vessels. This is now part of the corner of Kent, called Thanet, and is an island no longer.
The Jute leaders, Hengest and Horsa, had established themselves on British soil in 449 A.D. This was twenty-eight years before Aelle arrived, and with his followers "slew many Welsh"; that is, the British natives, the Wealas, or strangers, whom he found in possession of the land. The place "named Cymenesora," at which Aelle had landed, was close to Wittering, at the mouth of Chichester harbour.
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