It must be remembered that in these early days, the people had no fixed place of abode.  Their only homes were rude huts which they could put up or tear down at very short notice; and so when they heard of more fertile lands or a warmer climate across the mountains to the south they used to pull up stakes and migrate in a body, never to return.  It was always the more savage and uncivilized peoples who were most likely to migrate.  The lands which they wished to seize they generally found already settled by other tribes, more civilized and hence more peaceful, occupied in trade and agriculture, having gradually turned to these pursuits from their former habits of hunting and fighting.  Sometimes these more civilized and peace-loving people were able, by their better weapons and superior knowledge of the art of fortifying, to beat back the invasion of the immigrating barbarians.  Oftener, though, the rougher, ruder tribes were the victors, and settled down among the people they had conquered, to rule them, doing no work themselves, but forcing the conquered ones to feed and clothe them.

[Illustration:  Movable Huts of Early Germans]

History is full of instances of such conquests, and they were taking place, no doubt, ages before the times from which our earliest records date.  The best examples, however, are to be found in the invasions of the Roman Empire by the Germanic tribes to which we have referred above.  The country between the Rhine River and the Pyrenees Mountains, which had been called Gaul when the Gauls lived there, became France when the Franks conquered the Gauls and stayed to live among them.  In like manner, two German tribes became the master races in Spain.  The Burgundians came down from the shores of the Baltic Sea and gave their name to their new home in the fertile valley of the Saone (Son); the Vandals came out of Germany to roam through Spain, finally founding a kingdom in Africa; while the Lombards crossed the Alps to become the masters of the Valley of the Po, whither the Gauls had gone before them, seven hundred years earlier.

[Illustration:  Goths on the March]

[Illustration:  Franks Crossing the Rhine]

The island now known as Great Britain, which was inhabited two thousand years ago by the Britons and Gaels, Celtic peoples, was overrun and conquered in part about 450 A.D. by the Saxons and Angles, Germanic tribes, after whom part of the island was called Angleland.  (The men from the south of England are of the same blood as the Saxons in the German army, against whom they had to fight in the great war.) Then came Danes, who partially conquered the Angles and Saxons, and after them, in 1066 A.D., the country was again conquered by the Normans, descendants of some Norsemen, who, one hundred and fifty years before, had come down from Norway and conquered a large territory in the northwestern part of France.

[Illustration:  Men of Normandy Landing in England.]