Read Ebook: Magazine or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) by G W Abercrombie David Author Of Introduction Etc White John Master Of A Boarding School Dubious Author Wild John Dubious Author

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ENGLAND: A. D.449-547. The three tribes of the English conquest. The naming of the country.

"It was by ... three tribes , the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes, that southern Britain was conquered and colonized in the fifth and sixth centuries, according to the most ancient testimony. ... Of the three, the Angli almost if not altogether pass away into the migration: the Jutes and the Saxons, although migrating in great numbers, had yet a great part to play in their own homes and in other regions besides Britain; the former at a later period in the train and under the name of the Danes; the latter in German history from the eighth century to the present day."

"Among the Teutonic settlers in Britain some tribes stand out conspicuously; Angles, Saxons, and Jutes stand out conspicuously above all. The Jutes led the way; from the Angles the land and the united nation took their name; the Saxons gave us the name by which our Celtic neighbours have ever known us. But there is no reason to confine the area from which our forefathers came to the space which we should mark on the map as the land of the continental Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. So great a migration is always likely to be swollen by some who are quite alien to the leading tribe; it is always certain to be swollen by many who are of stocks akin to the leading tribe, but who do not actually belong to it. As we in Britain are those who stayed behind at the time of the second great migration of our people , so I venture to look on all our Low-Dutch kinsfolk on the continent of Europe as those who stayed behind at the time of the first great migration of our people. Our special hearth and cradle is doubtless to be found in the immediate marchland of Germany and Denmark, but the great common home of our people is to be looked on as stretching along the whole of that long coast where various dialects of the Low-Dutch tongue are spoken. If Angles and Saxons came, we know that Frisians came also, and with Frisians as an element among us, it is hardly too bold to claim the whole Netherlands as in the widest sense Old England, as the land of one part of the kinsfolk who stayed behind. Through that whole region, from the special Anglian corner far into what is now northern France, the true tongue of the people, sometimes overshadowed by other tongues, is some dialect or other of that branch of the great Teutonic family which is essentially the same as our own speech. From Flanders to Sleswick the natural tongue is one which differs from English only as the historical events of fourteen hundred years of separation have inevitably made the two tongues--two dialects, I should rather say, of the same tongue--to differ. From these lands we came as a people. That was our first historical migration. Our remote forefathers must have made endless earlier migrations as parts of the great Aryan body, as parts of the smaller Teutonic body. But our voyage from the Low-Dutch mainland to the isle of Britain was our first migration as a people. ... Among the Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain, two, the Angles and the Saxons, stood out foremost. These two between them occupied by far the greater part of the land that was occupied at all. Each of these two gave its name to the united nation, but each gave it on different lips. The Saxons were the earlier invaders; they had more to do with the Celtic remnant which abode in the land. On the lips then of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain, the whole of the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain were known from the beginning, and are known still, as Saxons. But, as the various Teutonic settlements drew together, as they began to have common national feelings and to feel the need of a common national name, the name which they chose was not the same as that by which their Celtic neighbours called them. They did not call themselves Saxons and their land Saxony; they called themselves English and their land England. I used the word Saxony in all seriousness; it is a real name for the Teutonic part of Britain, and it is an older name than the name England. But it is a name used only from the outside by Celtic neighbours and enemies; it was not used from the inside by the Teutonic people themselves. In their mouths, as soon as they took to themselves a common name, that name was English; as soon as they gave their land a common name, that name was England. ... And this is the more remarkable, because the age when English was fully established as the name of the people, and England as the name of the land, was an age of Saxon supremacy, an age when a Saxon state held the headship of England and of Britain, when Saxon kings grew step by step to be kings of the English and lords of the whole British island. In common use then, the men of the tenth and eleventh centuries knew themselves by no name but English."

See ANGLES AND JUTES, and SAXONS.

ENGLAND: A. D. 449-473. The Beginning of English history. The conquest of Kent by the Jutes.

"In the year 449 or 450 a band of warriors was drawn to the shores of Britain by the usual pledges of land and pay. The warriors were Jutes, men of a tribe which has left its name to Jutland, at the extremity of the peninsula that projects from the shores of North-Germany, but who were probably akin to the race that was fringing the opposite coast of Scandinavia and settling in the Danish Isles. In three 'keels'--so ran the legend of their conquest--and with their Ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at their head, these Jutes landed at Ebbsfleet in the Isle of Thanet. With the landing of Hengest and his war-band English history begins. ... In the first years that followed after their landing, Jute and Briton fought side by side; and the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a great battle on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their numbers probably grew fast as the news of their settlement in Thanet spread among their fellow pirates who were haunting the channel; and with the increase of their number must have grown the difficulty of supplying them with rations and pay. The dispute which rose over these questions was at last closed by Hengest's men with a threat of war." The threat was soon executed; the forces of the Jutes were successfully transferred from their island camp to the main shore, and the town of Durovernum was the first to experience their rage. "The town was left in blackened and solitary ruin as the invaders pushed along the road to London. No obstacle seems to have checked their march from the Stour to the Medway." At Aylesford , the lowest ford crossing the Medway, "the British leaders must have taken post for the defence of West Kent; but the Chronicle of the conquering people tells ... only that Horsa fell in the moment of victory; and the flint-heap of Horsted which has long preserved his name ... was held in aftertime to mark his grave. ... The victory of Aylesford was followed by a political change among the assailants, whose loose organization around ealdormen was exchanged for a stricter union. Aylesford, we are told, was no sooner won than 'Hengest took to the kingdom, and AElle, his son.' ... The two kings pushed forward in 457 from the Medway to the conquest of West Kent." Another battle at the passage of the Cray was another victory for the invaders, and, "as the Chronicle of their conquerors tells us, the Britons' forsook Kent-land and fled with much fear to London.' ... If we trust British tradition, the battle at Crayford was followed by a political revolution in Britain itself. ... It would seem ... that the Romanized Britons rose in revolt under Aurelius Ambrosianus, a descendant of the last Roman general who claimed the purple as an Emperor in Britain. ... The revolution revived for a while the energy of the province." The Jutes were driven back into the Isle of Thanet, and held there, apparently, for some years, with the help of the strong fortresses of Richborough and Reculver, guarding the two mouths of the inlet which then parted Thanet from the mainland. "In 465 however the petty conflicts which had gone on along the shores of the Wantsum made way for a decisive struggle. ... The overthrow of the Britons at Wipped'sfleet was so terrible that all hope of preserving the bulk of Kent seems from this moment to have been abandoned; and ... no further struggle disturbed the Jutes in its conquest and settlement. It was only along its southern shore that the Britons now held their ground. ... A final victory of the Jutes in 473 may mark the moment when they reached the rich pastures which the Roman engineers had reclaimed from Romney Marsh. ... With this advance to the mouth of the Weald the work of Hengest's men came to an end; nor did the Jutes from this time play any important part in the attack on the island, for their after-gains were limited to the Isle of Wight and a few districts on the Southampton Water."

A Logical Outline of English History

IN WHICH THE DOMINANT CONDITIONS AND INFLUENCES ARE DISTINGUISHED BY COLORS.

Physical or material . Ethnological . Social and political . Intellectual, moral and religious . Foreign .

The Island of Britain, separated from the Continent of Europe by a narrow breadth of sea, which makes friendly commerce easy and hostile invasion difficult;--its soil in great part excellent; its northern climate tempered by the humid warmth of the Gulf Stream; its conditions good for breeding a robust population, strongly fed upon corn and meats; holding, moreover, in store, for later times, a rare deposit of iron and coal, of tin and potter's clay, and other minerals of like utility; was occupied and possessed by tribes from Northern Europe, of the strongest race in history; already schooled in courage and trained to enterprise by generations of sea-faring adventure; uncorrupted by any mercenary contact with the decaying civilization of Rome, but ready for the knowledge it could give.

Fused, after much warring with one another and with their Danish kin, into a nation of Englishmen, they lived, for five centuries, an isolated life, until their insular and independent character had become deeply ingrained, and the primitive system of their social and political organization--their Townships, their Hundreds, their Shires, and the popular Moots, or courts, which determined and administered law in each--was rooted fast; though their king's power waxed and the nobles and the common people drew farther apart.

A. D. 1066.--Norman conquest.

Then they were mastered by another people, sprung from their own stock, but whose blood had been warmed and whose wit had been quickened by Latin and Gallic influences in the country of the Franks.

A new social and political system now formed itself in England as the result:--Feudalism modified by the essential democracy inherent in Old English institutions--producing a stout commonality to daunt the lords, and a strong aristocracy to curb the king.

A. D. 1215. Magna Oharta.

English royalty soon weakened itself yet more by ambitious strivings to maintain and extend a wide dominion over-sea, in Normandy and Aquitaine; and was helpless to resist when barons and commons came together to demand the signing and sealing of the Great Charter of Englishmen's rights.

A. D. 1265-1295--Parliament.

Out of the conditions which gave birth to Magna Charta there followed, soon, the development of the English Parliament as a representative legislature, from the Curia Regis of the Normans and the Witenagemot of the older English time.

A. D. 1337-1453--The Hundred Years War.

From the woful wars of a hundred years with France, which another century brought upon it, the nation, as a whole, suffered detriment, no doubt, and it progress was hindered in many ways; but politically the people took some good from the troubled times, because their kings were more dependant on them for money and men.

A. D. 1453-1485--War of the Roses

So likewise, they were bettered in some ways by the dreadful civil Wars of the Roses, which distracted England for thirty years. The nobles well-nigh perished, as an order, in these wars, while the middle-class people at large suffered relatively little, in numbers or estate.

A. D. 1348--The Great Plague.

But, previously, the great Plague, by diminishing the ranks of the laboring class, had raised wages and the standard of living among them, and had helped, with other causes, to multiply the small landowners and tenant farmers of the country, increasing the independent common class.

A. D. 1327-1377--Immigration of Flemish weavers.

A. D. 1485-1603--Absolutism of the Tudors.

But the commons of England were not prepared to make use of the actual power which they held. The nobles had led them in the past; it needed time to raise leaders among themselves, and time to organize their ranks. Hence no new checks on royalty were ready to replace those constraints which had been broken by the ruin of great houses in the civil wars, and the crown made haste to improve its opportunity for grasping power. There followed, under the Tudors, a period of absolutism greater than England had known before.

But this endured only for the time of the education of the commons, who conned the lessons of the age with eagerness and with understanding. The new learning from Greece and Rome; the new world knowledge that had been found in the West; the new ideas which the new art of the printer had furnished with wings,--all these had now gained their most fertile planting in the English mind. Their flower was the splendid literature of the Elizabethan age; they ripened fruits more substantial at a later day.

The intellectual development of the nation tended first toward a religious independence, which produced two successive revolts--from Roman Papacy and from the Anglican Episcopacy that succeeded it.

This religious new departure of the English people gave direction to a vast expansion of their energies in the outside world. It led them into war with Spain, and sent forth Drake and Hawkins and the Buccaneers, to train the sailors and pilot the merchant adventurers who would soon make England mistress of all the wide seas.

A. D. 1608-1688. The Stuarts. The Civil War. The Commonwealth. The Revolution.

Then, when these people, strong, prosperous and intelligent, had come to be ripely sufficient for self-government, there fell to them a foolish race of kings, who challenged them to a struggle which stripped royalty of all but its fictions, and established the sovereignty of England in its House of Commons for all time.

Unassailable in its island,--taking part in the great wars of the 18th century by its fleets and its subsidies chiefly,--busy with its undisturbed labors at home,--vigorous in its conquests, its settlements and its trade, which it pushed into the farthest parts of the earth,--creating wealth and protecting it from spoliation and from waste,--the English nation now became the industrial and economic school of the age. It produced the mechanical inventions which first opened a new era in the life of mankind on the material side; it attained to the splendid enlightenment of freedom in trade; it made England the workshop and mart of the world, and it spread her Empire to every Continent, through all the seas.

ENGLAND: A. D. 477-527. The conquests of the Saxons. The founding of the kingdoms of Sussex, Wessex and Essex.

"Whilst the Jutes were conquering Kent, their kindred took part in the war. Ship after ship sailed from the North Sea, filled with eager warriors. The Saxons now arrived--Ella and his three sons landed in the ancient territory of the Regni . The Britons were defeated with great slaughter, and driven into the forest of Andreade, whose extent is faintly indicated by the wastes and commons of the Weald. A general confederacy of the Kings and 'Tyrants' of the Britons was formed against the invaders, but fresh reinforcements arrived from Germany; the city of Andreades-Ceastre was taken by storm, all its inhabitants were slain and the buildings razed to the ground, so that its site is now entirely unknown. From this period the kingdom of the South Saxons was established in the person of Ella; and though ruling only over the narrow boundary of modern Sussex, he was accepted as the first of the Saxon Bretwaldas, or Emperors of the Isle of Britain. Encouraged, perhaps, by the good tidings received from Ella, another band of Saxons, commanded by Cerdic and his son Cynric, landed on the neighbouring shore, in the modern Hampshire . At first they made but little progress. They were opposed by the Britons; but Geraint, whom the Saxon Chroniclers celebrate for his nobility, and the British Bards extol for his beauty and valour, was slain . The death of the Prince of the 'Woodlands of Dyfnaint,' or Damnonia, may have been avenged, but the power of the Saxons overwhelmed all opposition; and Cerdic, associating his son Cynric in the dignity, became the King of the territory which he gained. Under Cynric and his son Ceaulin, the Saxons slowly, yet steadily, gained ground. The utmost extent of their dominions towards the North cannot be ascertained; but they had conquered the town of Bedford; and it was probably in consequence of their geographical position with respect to the countries of the Middle and East Saxons, that the name of the West Saxons was given to this colony. The tract north of the Thames was soon lost; but on the south of that river and of the Severn, the successors of Cerdic, Kings of Wessex, continued to extend their dominions. The Hampshire Avon, which retains its old Celtic name, signifying 'the Water,' seems at first to have been their boundary. Beyond this river, the British princes of Damnonia retained their power; and it was long before the country as far as the Exe became a Saxon March-land, or border. About the time that the Saxons under Cerdic and Cynric were successfully warring against the Britons, another colony was seen to establish itself in the territory or kingdom which, from its geographical position, obtained the name of East Saxony; but whereof the district of the Middle Saxons, now Middlesex, formed a part. London, as you well know, is locally included in Middle Saxony; and the Kings of Essex, and the other sovereigns who afterwards acquired the country, certainly possessed many extensive rights of sovereignty in the city. Yet, I doubt much whether London was ever incorporated in any Anglo-Saxon kingdom; and I think we must view it as a weak, tributary, vassal state, not very well able to resist the usurpations of the supreme Lord or Suzerain, AEscwin, or Ercenwine, who was the first King of the East Saxons . His son Sleda was married to Ricola, daughter to Ethelbert of Kent, who afterwards appears as the superior, or sovereign of the country; and though Sleda was King, yet Ethelbert joined in all important acts of government. This was the fate of Essex--it is styled a kingdom, but it never enjoyed any political independence, being always subject to the adjoining kings."

"The descents of , Cerdic and Cynric, in 495 at the mouth of the Itchen, and a fresh descent on Portchester in 501, can have been little more than plunder raids; and though in 508 a far more serious conflict ended in the fall of 5,000 Britons and their chief, it was not till 514 that the tribe whose older name seems to have been that of the Gewissas, but who were to be more widely known as the West Saxons, actually landed with a view to definite conquest."

"The greatness of Sussex did not last beyond the days of its founder AElle, the first Bretwalda. Whatever importance Essex, or its offshoot, Middlesex, could claim as containing the great city of London was of no long duration. We soon find London fluctuating between the condition of an independent commonwealth, and that of a dependency of the Mercian Kings. Very different was the destiny of the third Saxon Kingdom. Wessex has grown into England, England into Great Britain, Great Britain into the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom into the British Empire. Every prince who has ruled England before and since the eleventh century has had the blood of Cerdic the West Saxon in his veins. At the close of the sixth century Wessex had risen to high importance among the English Kingdoms, though the days of its permanent supremacy were still far distant."

ENGLAND: A. D. 547-633. The conquests of the Angles. The founding of their kingdoms.

Northwards of the East Saxons was established the kingdom of the East Angles, in which a northern and a southern people were distinguished. It is probable that, even during the last period of the Roman sway, Germans were settled in this part of Britain; a supposition that gains probability from several old Saxon sagas, which have reference to East Anglia at a period anterior to the coming of Hengest and Horsa. The land of the Gyrwas, containing 1,200 hides ... comprised the neighbouring marsh districts of Ely and Huntingdonshire, almost as far as Lincoln. Of the East Angles Wehwa, or Wewa, or more commonly his son Uffa, or Wuffa, from whom his race derived their patronymic of Uffings or Wuffings, is recorded as the first king. The neighbouring states of Mercia originated in the marsh districts of the Lindisware, or inhabitants of Lindsey , the northern part of Lincolnshire. With these were united the Middle Angles. This kingdom, divided by the Trent into a northern and a southern portion, gradually extended itself to the borders of Wales. Among the states which it comprised was the little Kingdom of the Hwiccas, conterminous with the later diocese of Worcester, or the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, and a part of Warwick. This state, together with that of the Hecanas, bore the common Germanic appellation of the land of the Magesaetas. ... The country to the north of the Humber had suffered the most severely from the inroads of the Picts and Scots. It became at an early period separated into two British states, the names of which were retained for some centuries, viz.: Deifyr , afterwards Latinized into Deira, extending from the Humber to the Tyne, and Berneich , afterwards Bernicia, from the Tyne to the Clyde. Here also the settlements of the German races appear anterior to the date given in the common accounts of the first Anglian kings of those territories, in the middle of the sixth century."

The three Anglian kingdoms of Northumberland, Mercia and East Anglia, "are altogether much larger than the Saxon and Jutish Kingdoms, so you see very well why the land was called 'England' and not 'Saxony.' ... 'Saxonia' does occur now and then, and it was really an older name than 'Anglia,' but it soon went quite out of use. ... But some say that there were either Jutes or Saxons in the North of England as soon or sooner than there were in the south. If so, there is another reason why the Scotch Celts as well as the Welsh, call us Saxons. It is not unlikely that there may have been some small Saxon or Jutish settlements there very early, but the great Kingdom of Northumberland was certainly founded by Ida the Angle in 547. It is more likely that there were some Teutonic settlements there before him, because the Chronicle does not say of him, as it does of Hengest, Cissa and Cerdie, that he came into the land by the sea, but only that he began the Kingdom. ... You must fully understand that in the old times Northumberland meant the whole land north of the Humber, reaching as far as the Firth of Forth. It thus takes in part of what is now Scotland, including the city of Edinburgh, that is Eadwinesburh, the town of the great Northumbrian King Eadwine, or Edwin . ... You must not forget that Lothian and all that part of Scotland was part of Northumberland, and that the people there are really English, and still speak a tongue which has changed less from the Old-English than the tongue of any other part of England. And the real Scots, the Gael in the Highlands, call the Lowland Scots 'Saxons,' just as much as they do the people of England itself. This Northumbrian Kingdom was one of the greatest Kingdoms in England, but it was often divided into two, Beornicia and Deira, the latter of which answered pretty nearly to Yorkshire. The chief city was the old Roman town of Eboracum, which in Old-English is Eoforwic, and which we cut short into York. York was for a long time the greatest town in the North of England. There are now many others much larger, but York is still the second city in England in rank, and it gives its chief magistrate the title of Lord-Mayor, as London? does, while in other cities and towns the chief magistrate is merely the Mayor, without any Lord. ... The great Anglian Kingdom of the Mercians, that is the Marchmen, the people on the march or frontier, seems to have been the youngest of all, and to have grown up gradually by joining together several smaller states, including all the land which the West Saxons had held north of the Thames. Such little tribes or states were the Lindesfaras and the Gainas in Lincolnshire, the Magesaetas in Herefordshire, the Hwiccas in Gloucester, Worcester, and part of Warwick, and several others. ... When Mercia was fully joined under one King, it made one of the greatest states in England, and some of the Mercian Kings were very powerful princes. It was chiefly an Anglian Kingdom; and the Kings were of an Anglian stock, but among the Hwiccas and in some of the other shires in southern and western Mercia, most of the people must really have been Saxons."

ENGLAND: A. D. 560.

Ethelbert becomes king of Kent.

ENGLAND: A. D. 593.

Ethelfrith becomes king of Northumbria.

ENGLAND: A. D. 597-685. The conversion of the English.

"It happened that certain Saxon children were to be sold for slaves at the marketplace at Rome; when Divine Providence, the great clock-keeper of time, ordering not only hours, but even instants , to his own honour, so disposed it, that Gregory, afterwards first bishop of Rome of that name, was present to behold them. It grieved the good man to see the disproportion betwixt the faces and fortunes, the complexions and conditions, of these children, condemned to a servile estate, though carrying liberal looks, so legible was ingenuity in their faces. It added more to his sorrow, when he conceived that those youths were twice vassals, bought by their masters, and 'sold under sin' , servants in their bodies, and slaves in their souls to Satan; which occasioned the good man to enter into further inquiry with the merchants what they were and whence they came, according to this ensuing dialogue:

Gregory.--'Whence come these captives?' Merchants.--'From the isle of Britain.' Gregory.--'Are those islanders Christians?' Merchants.--'O no, they are Pagans.' Gregory.--'It is sad that the author of darkness should possess men with so bright faces. But what is the name of their particular nation?' Merchants.--'They are called Angli.' Gregory.--'And well may, for their "angel like faces"; it becometh such to be coheirs with the angels in heaven. In what province of England did they live?' Merchants.--'In Deira.' Gregory.--'They are to be freed de Dei ir?, "from the anger of God." How call ye the king of that country?' Merchants.--'Ella.' Gregory.--'Surely hallelujah ought to be sung in his kingdom to the praise of that God who created all things.'

Thus Gregory's gracious heart set the sound of every word to the time of spiritual goodness. Nor can his words be justly censured for levity, if we consider how, in that age, the elegance of poetry consisted in rhythm, and the eloquence of prose in allusions. And which was the main, where his pleasant conceits did end, there his pious endeavours began; which did not terminate in a verbal jest, but produce real effects, which ensued hereupon."

In 590 the good Gregory became Bishop of Rome, or Pope, and six years later, still retaining the interest awakened in him by the captive English youth, he dispatched a band of missionary monks to Britain, with their prior, Augustine, at their head. Once they turned back, affrighted by what they heard of the ferocity of the new heathen possessors of the once-Christian island of Britain; but Gregory laid his commands upon them again, and in the spring of 597 they crossed the channel from Gaul, landing at Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet, where the Jutish invaders had made their first landing, a century and a half before. They found Ethelbert of Kent, the most powerful of the English kings at that time, already prepared to receive them with tolerance, if not with favor, through the influence of a Christian wife--queen Bertha, of the royal family of the Franks. The conversion and baptism of the Kentish king and court, and the acceptance of the new faith by great numbers of the people followed quickly. In November of the same year, 597, Augustine returned to Gaul to receive his consecration as "Archbishop of the English," establishing the See of Canterbury, with the primacy which has remained in it to the present day. The East Saxons were the next to bow to the cross and in 604 a bishop, Mellitus, was sent to London. This ended Augustine's work--and Gregory's-- for both died that year. Then followed an interval of little progress in the work of the mission, and, afterwards, a reaction towards idolatry which threatened to destroy it altogether. But just at this time of discouragement in the south, a great triumph of Christianity was brought about in Northumberland, and due, there, as in Kent, to the influence of a Christian queen. Edwin, the king, with many of his nobles and his people, were baptised on Easter Eve, A. D. 627, and a new center of missionary work was established at York. There, too, an appalling reverse occurred, when Northumberland was overrun, in 633, by Penda, the heathen king of Mercia; but the kingdom rallied, and the Christian Church was reestablished, not wholly, as before, under the patronage and rule of Rome, but partly by a mission from the ancient Celtic Church, which did not acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. In the end, however, the Roman forms of Christianity prevailed, throughout Britain, as elsewhere in western Europe. Before the end of the 7th century the religion of the Cross was established firmly in all parts of the island, the South Saxons being the latest to receive it. In the 8th century English missionaries were laboring zealously for the conversion of their Saxon and Frisian brethren on the continent.

ENGLAND: End of the 6th. Century. The extent, the limits and the character of the Teutonic conquest.

"Before the end of the 6th century the Teutonic dominion stretched from the German ocean to the Severn, and from the English Channel to the Firth of Forth. The northern part of the island was still held by Picts and Scots, Celtic tribes, whose exact ethnical relation to each other hardly concerns us. And the whole west side of the island, including not only modern Wales, but the great Kingdom of Strathclyde, stretching from Dumbarton to Chester, and the great peninsula containing Cornwall, Devon and part of Somerset, was still in the hands of independent Britons. The struggle had been a long and severe one, and the natives often retained possession of a defensible district long after the surrounding country had been occupied by the invaders. It is therefore probable that, at the end of the 6th century and even later, there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence. It is probable also that, within the same frontier, there still were Roman towns, tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied by them. But by the end of the 6th century even these exceptions must have been few. The work of the Conquest, as a whole, was accomplished. The Teutonic settlers had occupied by far the greater part of the territory which they ever were, in the strictest sense, to occupy. The complete supremacy of the island was yet to be won; but that was to be won, when it was won, by quite another process. The English Conquest of Britain differed in several important respects from every other settlement of a Teutonic people within the limits of the Roman Empire. ... Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the 6th century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers. The nature of the small Celtic element in our language would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which has found its way into English expresses some small domestic matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with."

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