But there are three of their tribes which stand fairly well marked off from one another in early history, and which bore, at least, the chief share in the colonisation of Britain.

These three tribes are the Jutes, the English, and the Saxons.

Closely connected with them, but less strictly bound in the same family tie, were the Frisians.
The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions, lived in the marshy forests and along the winding fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula of Denmark, which still preserves their name in our own day.

The English dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad neck of the peninsula, which we now call Sleswick.

And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder to that of the Rhine.
At the period when history lifts the curtain upon the future Germanic colonists of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants of the low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North Sea, and closely connected with other tribes on either side, such as the Frisians and the Danes, who still speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian languages.
But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the relationship between the first Teutonic settlers in Britain and their continental brethren.
Not only are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly connected with the Franks, who never to our knowledge took part in the colonisation of the island at all; and more closely connected with the Frisians, some of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical hordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a later date in all the northern counties: but they are also most closely connected of all with those members of the colonising tribes who did not themselves bear a share in the settlement, and whose descendants are still living in Denmark and in various parts of Germany.