Senlak Warriors Hengest and Horsa Anglo-Saxon England T-Shirt

Description

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the “Englisc” first arrived on these shores in the year 449, invited here by the Romano-Britons to fight the Picts who were invading from the north. The most famed of these early adventurers were Hengest and Horsa who arrived with their warriors in three ships. In the following years many more warriors crossed the sea and settled lowland Britain, bringing with them their families, their religion and their way of life. From the coast they gradually pushed inland up the rivers with small squadrons of ships whose crews became the founders of new communities as they advanced from East to West and north up through the midlands. The idea of an early Anglo-Saxon democracy is at the core of the English radical tradition and it was an outlook that many paid a heavy price for, but it was also the inspiration behind such things as, the English Revolt (peasants' Revolt), the Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, the Levellers, Diggers, Parliamentarians, 19th century trade union movement and the Chartists. It also inspired those who wrote the American constitution, one of the greatest documents ever written. It was Thomas Jefferson, one of the revered Founding Fathers of America who said of them “..the Saxon Chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed” He proposed in 1782 that Hengest and Horsa be included on the Great Seal of America because of the values of freedom and liberty that he believed that they represented. For Hengest and Horsa, the warrior brothers who laid the very foundation stones of the modern English nation, there can be no greater tribute than this. History matters and we forget it at our peril.