The Greatest Story in the World, Period 2 by Horace G. Hutchinson

All Europe, we may say, west and south of the Rhine and of the / Danube, had become Christian before the barbarians broke through the / wall. And when we say "all Europe," it includes even Ireland, out in / the north-west. When the Angles and the Saxons came invading Britain / and driving the Britons westward, they destroyed Christianity and / brought in their own northern religion with its gods, Odin, god of / War, and Thor, god of the Hammer, and the rest of them. But their / invasion and their disturbance never reached as far west as Ireland. / There, the Christian religion continued, while it was destroyed in / England.

The Anglo-Saxon conquerors were constantly fighting with each other, / as well as with the Britons, in England. The three big kingdoms of / these Anglo-Saxons were Northumbria, in the north; Wessex, in the / south-east and stretching westward along the southern part of / England; and Mercia, between the two. These fought with varying / success, and somewhere about 600 came an invasion into Kent of a / tribe closely allied to the Angles and the Saxons, and actually / included sometimes under either of these names -- the Jutes, from the / northern end of that Sleswig peninsula from which they all came. / They landed in Kent, and perhaps because they were so close of kin / with the conquerors already there, {61} or perhaps because they came / in very great force, it was a Jute king who soon became master of all / the east of England from the south of Kent as far north as the Wash. / And one of his first acts of importance, as king of all this country, / was to ask, and to receive, as his wife, the daughter of the King of / the Franks. The Franks by that time were masters of Gaul.