xxi The reader will remember the strong feeling of animosity then existing between seculars and regulars.

xxii This demoniacal laughter is one of the many legends about St. Dunstan.

xxiii See Preface.

xxiv Ruined British Cities.

The resistance of the Britons (or Welsh) to their Saxon (or English) foes was so determined, that, as in all similar cases, it increased the miseries of the conquered.  In Gaul the conquered Celts united with the Franks to make one people; in Spain they united with the Goths; but the conquerors of Britain came from that portion of Germany which had been untouched by Roman valour or civilisation, and consequently there was no disposition to unite with their unhappy victims, but the war became one of extermination.  Long and bravely did the unhappy Welsh struggle.  After a hundred years of warfare they still possessed the whole extent of the western coast, from the wall of Autoninus to the extreme promontory of Cornwall; and the principal cities of the inland territory still maintained the resistance.  The fields of battle, says Gibbon, might be traced in almost every district by the monuments of bones; the fragments of falling towers were stained by blood, the Britons were massacred ruthlessly to the last man in the conquered towns, without distinction of age or sex, as in Anderida.  Whole territories returned to desolation; the district between the Tyne and Tees, for example, to the state of a savage and solitary forest.  The wolves, which Roman authorities describe as nonexistent in England, again peopled those dreary wastes; and from the soft civilisation of Rome the inhabitants of the land fell back to the barbarous manners and customs of the shepherds and hunters of the German forests.  Nor did the independent Britons, who had taken refuge finally in Wales, or Devon and Cornwall, fare much better.  Separated by their foes from the rest of mankind, they returned to that state of barbarism from which they had emerged, and became a scandal at last to the growing civilisation of their English foes.

Under these circumstances the Saxons or English (the Saxons founded the kingdoms of Wessex and Essex; the Jutes, Kent; the Angles all the others.  The predominance of the latter caused the term English to become the general appellation.) cared little to inhabit the cities they conquered; they left them to utter desolation, as in the case described in the text, until a period came when, as in the case of the first English assaults upon Exeter and the west country, they no longer destroyed, but appropriated, while they spared the conquered.

xxv Seaton in Devonshire.

xxvi Elgiva or Aelgifu, signifies fairy gift.

Xxvii

The gate of hell stands open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: 
But to return, and view the upper skies—­
In this the toil, in this the labour lies.—­Dryden.

xxviii Valhalla.