The chief evidences for the military equipment and usages of the Teutonic conquerors of Europe, from the period of the dismemberment of the Roman empire to the great triumphs achieved by the Normans in the eleventh century, are the writers of those times, the miniatures which decorate their works, and the graves of these ancient races; which last have of late years yielded a wondrous harvest of valuable memorials, illustrating as well the domestic practices of their occupants, as their warlike array. If these three classes of monuments are useful in supplying each other's deficiencies, still more valuable do they become to the archæologist and the historian, by the confirmation which they mutually afford to each other's testimony. A few discrepancies indeed occasionally appear on points of minute detail; and it is in the pages of the historians and chroniclers that these are generally found: but when we consider the difficulty of the transmission of knowledge in those days, and the errors that may have crept in from the negligence of book-copyists through so many successive generations, the wonder is, not that something has been left obscure, but that so much has been faithfully transmitted to our times.
The various sons of Odin, whether settled in Germany, in Gaul, in Iberia, in Scandinavia, or in Britain, bore a strong resemblance to each other, both in their military equipment, and in such tactics as they possessed. If we find one branch of this vast family combating the Romans with more than usual art, or conducting a campaign with larger strategical views than their fellows, we must attribute it rather to the superior skill of a particular leader, or to their having borrowed some valuable hints from the practice of their opponents, than to any essential difference between this or that tribe of Teutons,--between the dwellers on the right bank of the Rhine and the dwellers on the left bank,--between those whose huts were on the flats of the Waal, and those who had built their cabins in the valleys of the Loire. Such differences as have been observed, we shall point out in our progress; but we are inclined to believe that, as collections are augmented and comparisons extended, resemblances will be found to increase, and differences to diminish.