egan to
tolerate even for themselves a town life.

E. 2.--And though in the country districts the agricultural population
were swept away pitilessly to make room for the invaders,[385] till
the fens of Ely[386] and the caves of Ribblesdale[387] became the
only refuge of the vanquished, yet, undoubtedly, many must have
been retained as slaves, especially amongst the women, to leaven the
language of the conquerors with many a Latin word, and their ferocity
with many a recollection of the gentler Roman past.

E. 3.--And there was one link with that past which not all the
massacres and fire-raisings of the Conquest availed to break. The
Romano-British populations might be slaughtered, the Romano-British
towns destroyed, but the Romano-British Church lived on; the most
precious and most abiding legacy bestowed by Rome upon our island.

E. 4.--The origin of that Church has been assigned by tradition
to directly Apostolic sources. The often-quoted passage from
Theodoret,[388] of St. Paul having "brought help" to "the isles of the
sea" [[Greek: tais en to pelagei diakeimenais nesois]], can scarcely,
however, refer to this island. No classical author ever uses the
word [Greek: pelagos] of the Oceanic waters; and the epithet [Greek:
diakeimenais], coming, as it does, in connection with the Apostle's
preaching in Italy and Spain, seems rather to point to the islands
between these peninsulas--Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Islands.
But the well-known words of St. Clement of Rome,[389] that St. Paul's
missionary journeys extended to "the End of the West" [Greek: to terma
tes duseos], were, as early as the 6th century, held to imply a visit
to Britain (for our island was popularly supposed by the ancients to
lie west of Spain).[390] The lines of Venantius (A.D. 580) even seem
to contain a reference to the tradition that he landed at Portsmouth:

"Transit et Oceanum, vel qua facit insula portum, Quasque
Britannus habet terras atque ultima Thule."

["Yea, through the ocean he passed, where the Port is made by
an island, And through each British realm, and where the world
endeth at Thule."]

E. 5.--The Menology of the Greek Church (6th century) ascribes the
organization of the British Church to the visitation, not of St. Paul,
but of St. Peter in person.

[Greek: O Petros ... ehis Bretannian paraginetai. Entha do
cheirotribosas [_sic_] kai polla ton hakatanomaton hethnon
eis ton tou Christou