But there were yet distinctions of rank in the villages and in the loose tribes formed by their union for purposes of war or otherwise.  The people were divided into three classes of aethelings or chieftains, freolings or freemen, and theows or slaves.  The aethelings were the nobles and rulers of each tribe.  There was no king:  but when the tribes joined together in a war, their aethelings cast lots together, and whoever drew the winning lot was made commander for the time being.  As soon as the war was over, each tribe returned to its own independence.  Indeed, the only really coherent body was the village or kindred:  and the whole course of early English history consists of a long and tedious effort at increased national unity, which was never fully realised till the Norman conquerors bound the whole nation together in the firm grasp of William, Henry, and Edward.

In personal appearance, the primitive Anglo-Saxons were typical Germans of very unmixed blood.  Tall, fair-haired, and gray-eyed, their limbs were large and stout, and their heads of the round or brachycephalic type, common to most Aryan races.  They did not intermarry with other nations, preserving their Germanic blood pure and unadulterated.  But as they had slaves, and as these slaves must in many cases have been captives spared in war, we must suppose that such descriptions apply, strictly speaking, to the freemen and chieftains alone.  The slaves might be of any race, and in process of time they must have learnt to speak English, and their children must have become English in all but blood.  Many of them, indeed, would probably be actually English on the father’s side, though born of slave mothers.  Hence we must be careful not to interpret the expressions of historians, who would be thinking of the free classes only, and especially of the nobles, as though they applied to the slaves as well.  Wherever slavery exists, the blood of the slave community is necessarily very mixed.  The picture which the heathen English have drawn of themselves in Beowulf is one of savage pirates, clad in shirts of ring-armour, and greedy of gold and ale.  Fighting and drinking are their two delights.  The noblest leader is he who builds a great hall, throws it open for his people to carouse in, and liberally deals out beer, and bracelets, and money at the feast.  The joy of battle is keen in their breasts.  The sea and the storm are welcome to them.  They are fearless and greedy pirates, not ashamed of living by the strong hand alone.

In creed, the English were pagans, having a religion of beliefs rather than of rites.  Their chief deity, perhaps, was a form of the old Aryan Sky-god, who took with them the guise of Thunor or Thunder (in Scandinavian, Thor), an angry warrior hurling his hammer, the thunder-bolt, from the stormy clouds.  These thunder-bolts were often found buried in the earth; and being really the polished stone-axes of the earlier