against the Saxons, and complaints as to the weakness, wickedness, and apathy of the British chieftains.  It says little that can throw any light on the question as to whether the Welsh were largely spared, though it abounds with wild and vague declamation about the extermination of the natives.  Even Gildas, however, mentions that some of his countrymen, “constrained by famine, came and yielded themselves up to their enemies as slaves for ever;” while others, “committing the safeguard of their lives to mountains, crags, thick forests, and rocky isles, though with trembling hearts, remained in their fatherland.”  These passages certainly suggest that a Welsh remnant survived in two ways within the English pale, first as slaves, and secondly as isolated outlaws.

Baeda stands on a very different footing.  His authenticity is undoubted; his language is simple and straightforward.  He was born in or about the year 672, only two hundred years after the landing of the first English colonists in Thanet.  Scarcely more than a century separated him from the days of Ida.  The constant lingering warfare with the Welsh on the western frontier was still for him a living fact.  The Celt still held half of Britain.  At the date of his birth the northern Welsh still retained their independence in Strathclyde; the Welsh proper still spread to the banks of the Severn; and the West Welsh of Cornwall still owned all the peninsula south of the Bristol Channel as far eastward as the Somersetshire marshes.  Beyond Forth and Clyde, the Picts yet ruled over the greater part of the Highlands, while the Scots, who have now given the name of Scotland to the whole of Britain beyond the Cheviots, were a mere intrusive Irish colony in Argyllshire and the Western Isles.  He lived, in short, at the very period when Britain was still in the act of becoming England; and no historical doubts of any sort hang over the authenticity of his great work, “The Ecclesiastical History of the English people.”  But Baeda unfortunately knows little more about the first settlement than he could learn from Gildas, whom he quotes almost verbatim.  He tells us, however, nothing of extermination of the Welsh.  “Some,” he says, “were slaughtered; some gave themselves up to undergo slavery:  some retreated beyond the sea:  and some, remaining in their own land, lived a miserable life in the mountains and forests.”  In all this, he is merely transcribing Gildas, but he saw no improbability in the words.  At a later date, AEthelfrith, of Northumbria, he tells us, “rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral part of the English territory, whether by subjugating or expatriating[1] the natives,” than any previous king.  Eadwine, before his conversion, “subdued to the empire of the English the Mevanian islands,” Man and Anglesey; but we know that the population of both islands is still mainly Celtic in blood and speech.  These examples sufficiently show us, that even before the introduction of Christianity, the English did not always utterly destroy the Welsh inhabitants of conquered districts.  And it is universally admitted that, after their conversion, they fought with the Welsh in a milder manner, sparing their lives as fellow-Christians, and permitting them to retain their lands as tributary proprietors.