The impression conveyed by the story of the fight at Finnsburg and of Hygelac's raid on Merovingian Gaul is of a society which would have seemed anarchical to any Roman provincial governor of the fourth century. The many homes and farmsteads which have been excavated on some of the larger Baltic islands, notably Bornholm, once the home of the Burgundians, reflect small communities supporting themselves by agriculture and no doubt living peaceably for much of their lives with only periodic outbreaks of violence. Similarly the many pagan Saxon cemeteries widely distributed over the English lowlands, and sometimes counting many hundreds of burials, testify to the settlement of the newly-won lands by small village communities, again supporting themselves by agriculture. But this foundation of the Germanic society of north-west Europe remains inarticulate and is to be known only through some of its former possessions, which have indeed much to tell of its craftsmanship and material skills, whether in the handling of wood for building ships whose quality could not easily have been bettered for the needs they were intended to meet, or in the use of metal and precious stones for their arms and their jewellery. In a society such as this, uncontrolled by any occupying military power, and knowing nothing of any universal system of law, taxation or schooling, the security of the individual did not lie within any conception of a state, but within the much smaller unity of the kin.