D.,
the Saxons quarreled and fought with their friends, the Angles.
They took some Angles prisoners and carried them to Rome to be sold
in the great slave-market there. A monk named Gregory passed one
day through the market and saw these captives. He asked the dealer
who they were. "Angles," was the answer.
"Oh," said the monk, "they would be ANGELS instead of ANGLES if they
were only Christians; for they certainly have the faces of angels."
Years after, when that monk was the Pope of Rome, he remembered this
conversation and sent the monk Augustine (Au-gus'-tine) to England
to teach the Christian religion to the savage but angel-faced Angles.
Augustine and the British missionaries converted the Anglo-Saxons
two hundred years before the German Saxons were converted.
Still, though both Angles and Saxons called themselves Christians,
they were seldom at peace; and for more than two hundred years they
frequently fought. Various chiefs tried to make themselves kings;
and at length there came to be no less than seven small kingdoms
in South Britain.
In 784 Egbert claimed to be heir of the kingdom called Wessex;
but the people elected another man and Egbert had to flee for his
life.
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