From The Bliss Book, by Charles Arthur Hoppin, privately printed: Hartford,
Connecticut, U.S.A., MCMXIII: --The status of the first Bliss and of his
immediate descendants, his name itself, the date and the place of its origin,
show that he was of the conquered, not from the conquering Normans, thus being
descended from one of the Teutonic races. The Danish blood is understood to
have become amalgamated with that of the Angles in that eastern part of England
called East Anglia, not far from the southwestern borders of which the Bliss
family first appears in English history. This locality suggests a possibility
of the Blisses, prior to the origin of their name, having been of Danish or
Anglian blood, they were "the Northmen" of ancient Denmark. They are described
in the old chronicles as tall, well-built men, of fierceness in war and
hardihood upon the sea, of bright rather than fair complexion, reddish rather
than yellow hair, and of dull grayish rather that clear blue eyes. For a
thousand years after Christ they held to the old religionof northern Europe,
regarding Christians as effeminate in mind and body. They had little respect
for "a God that would not fight." Their noblest belief was to die by the sword
or at sea. An historian calls them "heathen pirates." Grant Allen says that
the Danes completely undid the work of the civilized Romans in England and
"threw back the north into primitive barbarism and perhaps established the
political and social supremacy of the south of England for nearly ten
centuries." The south was under a Saxon government. Alfred the Great ("the
purest, grandest, most heroic sould that ever sprang from our race") could not
drive the Danes out; but the coming of the Normans soon ended the power of the
dreaded Dane and gave England the chance to advance, which it has continued to
do up to the present generation. And since that Norman victory, in the year
1066, no successful warrior has set hostile foot upon the Isle of Britain, and
no nation, excepting the American and that of Joan of Arc, has wholly defeated
its people in a war. While we cannot prove that the blood was purely all
Saxon, it has been made palin that the family name was Saxon. The Saxons,
wrote Tacitus, "are the finest of all the German tribes, and strive more than
the rest to found their greatness upon equality," --- "a passionless, firm and
quiet people, they live a solitary life, and do not stir up wars nor harass the
country by plunder and theft." Another writes modernly: "They were an
agricultural people of the peasant class, independent farmers who acknowledged
no chief, no king, and were governed by the Witenagemont, or the Meeting of the
Wise Men. They came to England from Northwestern Germany because they wanted
land. They were landowners with equal rights." In the fifth and sixth
centuries the Saxon entered Britain as a conquerer and to remain. He swept
everything before him. The Celtic tribes and the savage Picts and Scots, who
had been preying upon the Celts since the return of the Roman army to Rome in
401, were no match for him. The Saxons wiped out everything Celtic and
everything Roman--people, language, customs, and ideas perishing; only a few
Roman place-names survived. A remnant of the Celts escaped to what is now
Wales, and the modern Welsh are their descendants. "A more fearful blow never
fell upon any nation than the landing of the Angles and Saxons was to the Celts
of Britain." of course, six hundred years after Christ, these Saxons had not
embraced Christianity.