From the first the daring of the English race broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized either sword or oar.

"Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time, "fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world!" [Sidenote: Britain] Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them.

The piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
This land was Britain.

When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire.

In the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of Julius Caesar revealed it to the Roman world; and a century after Caesar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its conquest.