Magic in Anglo-Saxon England the pantheon of Anglo-Saxon gods in order to understand "the sort of powers that may lie behind magic ritual." He argued that the Anglo-Saxon pagan religion was "a mass of unorganised popular belief" with various traditions being passed down orally. The language of the Anglo-Saxons was Old English, a Germanic language descended from those of several tribes in continental Europe. Old English had several words that refer to "powerful women associated with divination, magical protection, healing and cursing". One of these was "hægtesse" or "hægtis", whilst another was "burgrune". Another Old English term for magicians was "dry", making them practitioners
Anglo-Norman language and French have led to many "faux amis" (words having similar form but different meanings) in Modern English and Modern French. Since although a Romance language, Norman contains a significant amount of lexical material from Norse, some of the words introduced into England as part of Anglo-Norman were of Germanic origin. Indeed, sometimes one can identify cognates such as "flock" (Germanic in English existing prior to the Conquest) and "floquet" (Germanic in Norman). The case of the word "mug" demonstrates that in instances, Anglo-Norman may have reinforced certain Scandinavian elements already present in English. "Mug" had been introduced into northern