Kemble's position is, strictly speaking, an intermediate one: in some respects he is very near to Eichhorn and Grimm; although his chief work was published in 1849, he was not acquainted with Waitz's first books. But Kemble is mostly in touch with those parts of Eichhorn's theory which could be accepted by later Germanists; other important tenets of the Romantic School are left in the shade or rejected, and as a whole Kemble's teaching is essentially Germanistic. Kemble's 'Saxons in England' takes its peculiar shape and marks an epoch in English historical literature, mainly because it presents the first attempt to utilise the enormous material of Saxon Charters, in the collection of which Kemble has done such invaluable work. With this copious and exact, but very onesided, material at his disposal, our author takes little notice of current tales about the invasion of Great Britain by Angles and Saxons. Such tales may be interesting from a mythological or literary point of view, but the historian cannot accept them as evidence. At the same time one cannot but wish to try and get certain knowledge of an historical fact, which, as far as the history of England is concerned, appears as the first manifestation of the Teutonic race in its stupendous greatness. Luckily enough we have some means to judge of the invasion in the names of localities and groups of population. Read in this light the history of Conquest appears very gradual and ancient. It began long before the recorded settlements, and while Britain was still under Roman sway. The struggle with the Celts was a comparatively easy one; the native population was by no means destroyed, but remained in large numbers in the lower orders of society. Notwithstanding such remnants, the history of the Anglo-Saxon period is entirely Teutonic in its aspect, and presents only one instance of the general process by which the provinces of the Empire were modified by conquerors of Teutonic race.
The root of the whole social system is to be found in the Mark, which is a division of the territory held jointly by a certain number of freemen for the purposes of cultivation, mutual help and defence. The community began as a kinship or tribe, but even when the original blood ties were lost sight of and modified by the influx of heterogeneous elements, the community remained self-sufficient and isolated. The whole fabric of society rested on property in land: as its political divisions were based on the possession of common lands, even so the rank of an individual depended entirely on his holding. The Teutonic world had no idea of a citizen severed from the soil. The curious fact that the normal holding, the hide, was equal all over England (33-1/2 acres) can be explained only by its origin; it came full-formed from Germany and remained unchanged in spite of all diversities of geographical and economical conditions.
