Of these two, Angul, the fountain, so runs the tradition, of the beginnings of the Anglian race, caused his name to be applied to the district which he ruled.  This was an easy kind of memorial wherewith to immortalise his fame:  for his successors a little later, when they gained possession of Britain, changed the original name of the island for a fresh title, that of their own land.  This action was much thought of by the ancients:  witness Bede, no mean figure among the writers of the Church, who was a native of England, and made it his care to embody the doings of his country in the most hallowed treasury of his pages; deeming it equally a religious duty to glorify in writing the deeds of his land, and to chronicle the history of the Church.

From Dan, however, so saith antiquity; the pedigrees of our kings have flowed in glorious series, like channels from some parent spring.  Grytha, a matron most highly revered among the Teutons, bore him two sons, humble and Lother.

The ancients, when they were to choose a king, were wont to stand on stones planted in the ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to foreshadow from the steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be lasting.  By this ceremony Humble was elected king at his father’s death, thus winning a novel favour from his country; but by the malice of ensuing fate he fell from a king into a common man.  For he was taken by Lother in war, and bought his life by yielding up his crown; such, in truth, were the only terms of escape offered him in his defeat.  Forced, therefore, by the injustice of a brother to lay down his sovereignty, he furnished the lesson to mankind, that there is less safety, though more pomp, in the palace than in the cottage.  Also, he bore his wrong so meekly that he seemed to rejoice at his loss of title as though it were a blessing; and I think he had a shrewd sense of the quality of a king’s estate.  But Lother played the king as insupportably as he had played the soldier, inaugurating his reign straightway with arrogance and crime; for he counted it uprightness to strip all the most eminent of life or goods, and to clear his country of its loyal citizens, thinking all his equals in birth his rivals for the crown.  He was soon chastised for his wickedness; for he met his end in an insurrection of his country; which had once bestowed on him his kingdom, and now bereft him of his life.

Skiold, his son, inherited his natural bent, but not his behaviour; avoiding his inborn perversity by great discretion in his tender years, and thus escaping all traces of his father’s taint.  So he appropriated what was alike the more excellent and the earlier share of the family character; for he wisely departed from his father’s sins, and became a happy counterpart of his grandsire’s virtues.  This man was famous in his youth among the huntsmen of his father for his conquest of a monstrous beast:  a marvellous incident, which augured his