Hengist and Horsa
Hengist and Horsa are Germanic brothers said to have led the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in their supposed invasion of Britain in the 5th century.
Modern scholarly consensus regards Hengist and Horsa as mythical figures, given their alliterative animal names, the seemingly constructed nature of their genealogy, and the unknowable quality of Bede's sources.
For a time, they served as mercenaries for Vortigern, King of the Britons, but later they turned against him (British accounts have them betraying him in the Treachery of the Long Knives).
A figure named Hengest, possibly identifiable with the leader of British legend, appears in the Finnesburg Fragment and in Beowulf.
Eoh derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *éḱwos, whence also Latin equus, which gave rise to the modern English words equine and equestrian.
Hors is derived from the Proto-Indo-European base *kurs, to run, which also gave rise to hurry, carry and current (the latter two are borrowings from French).
Hors eventually replaced eoh, fitting a pattern elsewhere in Germanic languages where the original names of sacred animals are abandoned for adjectives; for example, the word bear, meaning 'the brown one'.
[7] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which exists in nine manuscripts and fragments compiled from the 9th to the 12th centuries, records that in the year 449, Vortigern invited Hengist and Horsa to Britain to assist his forces in fighting the Picts.
The Saxons populated Essex, Sussex, and Wessex; the Jutes Kent, the Isle of Wight, and part of Hampshire; and the Angles East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria (leaving their original homeland, Angeln, deserted).
[10] After the Saxons had lived on Thanet for "some time" Vortigern promised them supplies of clothing and other provisions on condition that they assist him in fighting the enemies of his country.
Vortigern agreed and Ochta and Ebissa arrived with 40 ships, sailed around the land of the Picts, conquered "many regions", and assaulted the Orkney Islands.
[13] Vortigern had meanwhile incurred the wrath of Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre (by taking his own daughter for a wife and having a son by her) and had gone into hiding at the advice of his council.
But at length his son Vortimer engaged Hengist and Horsa and their men in battle, drove them back to Thanet and there enclosed them and beset them on the western flank.
Hengist ("whose years and wisdom entitled him to precedence") replied that they had left their homeland of Saxony to offer their services to Vortigern or some other prince, as part of a Saxon custom in which, when the country became overpopulated, able young men were chosen by lot to seek their fortunes in other lands.
In the ensuing battle "there was little occasion for the Britons to exert themselves, for the Saxons fought so bravely, that the enemy, formerly victorious, were speedily put to flight".
A "man of experience and subtlety", Hengist told Vortigern that his enemies assailed him from every quarter, and that his subjects wished to depose him and make Aurelius Ambrosius king.
Hengist asked instead for leave to build a fortress on a piece of land small enough that it could be encircled by a leather thong.
[21] After executing Vortigern's orders, Hengist took a bull's hide and made it into a single thong, which he used to encircle a carefully chosen rocky place (perhaps at Caistor in Lindsey).
When the Saxons could no longer bear the British onslaughts, they sent out Vortigern to ask his son to allow them safe passage back to Germany.
At the signal Nemet oure Saxas (get your knives), the Saxons fell upon the unsuspecting Britons and massacred them, while Hengist held Vortigern by his cloak.
He explained that he had been at the Treachery of the Long Knives, but had escaped when God threw him a stake to defend himself with, making him the only Briton present to survive.
Realizing Kaerconan would not hold against Aurelius, Hengist stopped outside the town and ordered his men to make a stand, "for he knew that his whole security now lay in his sword".
When Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, arrived, Eldol knew the day was won and grabbed Hengist's helmet, dragging him into the British ranks.
[38] The Icelander Snorri Sturluson, writing in the 13th century, briefly mentions Hengist in the Prologue, the first book of the Prose Edda.
The Prologue gives a euhemerized account of Germanic history, including the detail that Woden put three of his sons in charge of Saxony.
[39] On farmhouses in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, horse-head gables were referred to as "Hengst und Hors" (Low German for "stallion and mare") as late as around 1875.
In 1995, using optically stimulated luminescence dating, David Miles and Simon Palmer of the Oxford Archaeology Unit assigned the Uffington White Horse to the Bronze Age.
One of three members of the committee, Thomas Jefferson, proposed that one side of the seal feature Hengist and Horsa, "the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we assumed".
[54] In 1949, Prince Georg of Denmark came to Pegwell Bay in Kent to dedicate the longship Hugin, commemorating the landing of Hengest and Horsa at nearby Ebbsfleet 1500 years earlier in 449 AD.
In Alfred Duggan's Conscience of the King, Hengist plays a major role in the early career of Cerdic Elesing, legendary founder of the kingdom of Wessex.
