"Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!" [Sidenote: English Piracy] The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of Rome.

For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart fighters; and their world was a world of war.

Tribe warred with tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance were handed on from father to son.

Their mood was above all a mood of fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense of manhood and the worth of man.

A grim joy in hard fighting was already a characteristic of the race.