History for ready reference, Volume 1, A-Elba

chapter 40.

Chapter 91197 wordsPublic domain

"In close neighbourhood with the Saxons in the middle of the fourth century were the Angli, a tribe whose origin is more uncertain and the application of whose name is still more a matter of question. If the name belongs, in the pages of the several geographers, to the same nation, it was situated in the time of Tacitus east of the Elbe; in the time of Ptolemy it was found on the middle Elbe, between the Thuringians to the south and the Varini to the north; and at a later period it was forced, perhaps by the growth of the Thuringian power, into the neck of the Cimbric peninsula. It may, however, be reasonably doubted whether this hypothesis is sound, and it is by no means clear whether, if it be so, the Angli were not connected more closely with the Thuringians than with the Saxons. To the north of the Angli, after they had reached their Schleswig home, were the Jutes, of whose early history we know nothing, except their claims to be regarded as kinsmen of the Goths and the close similarity between their descendants and the neighbour Frisians."

_William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England,