im to assist
[v]. The Britons thus rejected were reduced to despair, deserted
their habitations, abandoned tillage, and flying for protection to the
forests and mountains, suffered equally from hunger and from the
enemy. The barbarians themselves began to feel the pressure of famine
in a country which they had ravaged; and being harassed by the
dispersed Britons, who had not dared to resist them in a body, they
retreated with their spoils into their own country [w].
[FN [t] Gildas. Bede, lib. 1. Ann. Beverl. p. 45. [u] Gildas.
Bede, lib. 1. cap. 13. Malmesbury, lib. 1. cap. 1. Ann. Beverl. p.
45. [v] Chron. Sax. p. 11 edit. 1692. [w] Ann. Beverl. p. 45.]

The Britons, taking advantage of this interval, returned to their
usual occupations; and the favourable seasons which succeeded seconded
their industry, made them soon forget their past miseries, and
restored to them great plenty of all the necessaries of life. No more
can be imagined to have been possessed by a people so rude, who had
not, without the assistance of the Romans, art of masonry sufficient
to raise a stone rampart for their own defence; yet the Monkish
historians [x], who treat of those events, complain of the luxury of
the Britons during this period, and ascribe to that vice, not to their
cowardice or improvident counsels, all their subsequent calamities.
[FN [x] Gildas. Bede, lib. 1. cap. 14.]

The Britons, entirely occupied in the enjoyment of the present
interval of peace, made no provision for resisting the enemy, who,
invited by their former timid behaviour, soon threatened them with a
new invasion. We are not exactly informed what species of civil
government the Romans on their departure had left among the Britons;
but it appears probable, that the great men in, the different
districts assumed a kind of regal though precarious authority; and
lived in a great measure independent of each other [y]. To this
disunion of counsels were also added the disputes of theology; and the
disciples of Pelagius, who was himself a native of Britain, having
increased to a great multitude, gave alarm to the clergy, who seem to
have been more intent on suppressing them, than on opposing the public
enemy [z]. Labouring under these domestic evils, and menaced with a
foreign invasion, the Britons attended only to the suggestions of
their present fears; and following the counsels of Vortigern, Prince
of Dumnonium, who, though stained with every vice, posse