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• Gender	Male
  Person ID	I97436	Brainard (Brainerd) / Foster / Fish
  Last Modified	13 Apr 1999 00:00:00
  Children	1. Thomas BLYSSE, b. Abt 1460, of Leamington,Warrshire   2. Richard BLYSSE, b. 1460/1465, of Daventry > 3. Richard BLYSSE   4. Henry BLYSSE, b. 1450/1460, of Daventry
  Family ID	F42549	Group Sheet

• Notes

  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.