but inspired with the same avidity for blood,” had come with their bushy beards and their half-clothed bodies, to supplant so effeminate a race.  When he makes this feeble people send an embassy to a Roman in Gaul to say, “The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the barbarians:  thus two modes of death await us; we are either slain or drowned,” we must wonder at the very straitened limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.

Surely much of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical evidence.  M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble supplications, so declared by Gildas, to Rome for aid, as evidences of the effeminacy of that nation, whose resistance to the Saxons has given a chapter to history at a time when history has few traces of Italians, Spaniards, and Gauls.

That the representations of Gildas could only be partially true, as applied to some particular districts, is sufficiently proved, by the undoubted fact that within little more than twenty years from the date of these cowardly demonstrations Anthemius, the Emperor, solicited the aid of the Britons against the Visigoths; and twelve thousand men from this island, under one of the native chieftains, Rhiothimus, sailed up the Loire, and fought under the Roman command.  They are described by a contemporary Roman writer as quick, well-armed; turbulent and contumacious from their bravery, their numbers, and their common agreement.  These were not the people who were likely to have stood upon a wall to be pulled down by hooked weapons.  They might have been the people who had clung, more than the other inhabitants of the Roman provinces, to their original language and customs; but it is not improbable that they would have been of the mixed races with whom Rome had been in more intimate relations, and to whom she continued to render offices of friendship after the separation of the island province from her empire.

Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates.  Britain, according to St. Jerome, was “a province fertile in tyrants.”  The Roman municipal government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing power.  It fell to pieces here, as in Gaul, when that power was withdrawn.  It resolved itself into a number of local governments without any principle of cohesion.  The vicar of the municipium became an independent ruler and head of a little republic; and that his authority was contested by some who had partaken of his delegated dignity may be reasonably inferred.