When Rome added Britain to its empire in the first century a. d., Roman power had seemed limitless. Yet it was in Britain that the emperor Hadrian (ruled 117-138) had given physical form to the idea that Rome's power did indeed have limits: Hadrian's Wall. Built between 122 and 128 and possibly inspired by travelers' tales of the Great Wall of China, the wall exMiddle Ages: Almanac tended some seventy-three miles across what is now Scotland and was designed to keep out a native Scottish people called the Picts. The Picts overran it several times, however, and threatened to do so again after the Romans permanently withdrew their legions in 410 to protect Rome itself from the Visigoths—another failed project.
By then the Britons had become Romanized and had accepted the Christian religion. They saw themselves as the last line of defense between civilization and barbarism. To assist their defense against the Picts, one of the Britons' leaders asked the help of three Germanic tribes—the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes—living in what is now northern Germany and Denmark. But once they arrived, the Germans realized how defenseless the natives were, so they simply took over the island.
Today the greater part of Britain is named England after the Angles, and the term "Anglo-Saxon" is used to describe persons of English descent. The German invaders' language, which completely replaced the Britons' Celtic tongue, ultimately became English, or rather Old English. An English-speaker today would have trouble recognizing Old English, yet modern English maintains many words from the distant past—usually short, highly direct terms such as "hit" or "gold."
World History
