The difference of races would also promote the contests for command.  If East Anglia contained a preponderance of one race of settlers, and Kent and Sussex of another, they might well quarrel for supremacy.  But when all the settlers on the Saxon shore had lost the control and protection of the Count who once governed them, it may also be imagined that the more exclusively British districts would not readily cooeperate for defence with those who were more strange to their kindred even than the Roman.  All the European Continent was in a state of political dislocation; and we may safely conclude that when the great power was shattered that had so long held the government of the world, the more distant and subordinate branch of its empire would resolve itself into some of the separate elements of authority and of imperfect obedience by which a clan is distinguished from a nation.

Nor was the power of the Christian Church in Britain of a more united character than that of the civil rulers.  No doubt a church had been formed and organized.  There were bishops, so called, in the several cities; but their authority was little concentrated and their tenets were discordant.  Pilgrimages were even made to the sacred places of Palestine; and at a very early period monasteries were founded.  That of Bangor, or the Great Circle, seems to have had some relation to the ancient Druidical worship, upon which it was probably engrafted in that region where Druidism had long flourished.  There were British versions of the Bible.  But that the church had no sustaining power at the period when civil society was so wholly disorganized, may be inferred from circumstances which preceded the complete overthrow of Christian rites by Saxon heathendom.

Bede devotes several chapters of his Ecclesiastical History to the actions of St. Germanus, who came expressly to Britain to put down the Pelagian heresy; and, amid the multitude of miraculous circumstances, records how “the authors of the perverse notions lay hid, and, like the evil spirits, grieved for the loss of the people that was rescued from them.  At length, after mature deliberation, they had the boldness to enter the lists, and appeared, being conspicuous for riches, glittering in apparel, and supported by the flatteries of many.”  The people, according to Bede, were the judges of this great controversy, and gave their voices for the orthodox belief.

Whether the Pelagians were expelled from Britain by reason or by force, it is evident that, in the middle of the fifth century, there was a strong element of religious disunion very generally prevailing; and that at a period when the congregations were in a great degree independent of each other, and therefore difficult of subjection to a common authority, the rich and the powerful had adopted a creed which was opposed to the centralizing rule of the Roman Church, and were arguing about points of faith as strongly as they were contesting for worldly supremacy.  Dr. Lappenberg justly points out this celebrated controversy in our country as “indicating the weakness of that religious connection which was so soon to be totally annihilated.”  We may, in some degree, account for the reception of the doctrine of Pelagius by knowing that he was a Briton, whose plain unlatinized name was Morgan.