fresh supplies from their own country; and a total
extermination of the Britons became the sole expedient for providing a
settlement and subsistence to the new planters. Hence there have been
found in history few conquests more ruinous than that of the Saxons;
and few revolutions more violent than that which they introduced.
[FN [d] Gildas. Bede. lib. 1.]

So long as the contest was maintained with the natives, the several
Saxon princes preserved a union of counsels and interests; but after
the Britons were shut up in the barren counties of Cornwall and Wales,
and gave no farther disturbance to the conquerors, the band of
alliance was in a great measure dissolved among the princes of the
Heptarchy. Though one prince seems still to have been allowed, or to
have assumed, an ascendant over the whole, his authority, if it ought
ever to be deemed regular or legal, was extremely limited; and each
state acted as if it had been independent, and wholly separate from
the rest. Wars therefore, and revolutions and dissensions, were
unavoidable among a turbulent and military people; and these events,
however intricate or confused, ought now to become the objects of our
attention. But, added to the difficulty of carrying on at once the
history of seven independent kingdoms, there is great discouragement
to a writer, arising from the uncertainty, at least barrenness, of the
accounts transmitted to us. The monks, who were the only annalists
during those ages, lived remote from public affairs, considered the
civil transactions as entirely subordinate to the ecclesiastical, and,
besides partaking of the ignorance and barbarity which were then
universal, were strongly infected with credulity, with the love of
wonder, and with a propensity to imposture; vices almost inseparable
from their profession and manner of life. The history of that period
abounds in names, but is extremely barren of events; or the events are
related so much without circumstances and causes, that the most
profound or most eloquent writer must despair of rendering them either
instructive or entertaining to the reader. Even the great learning
and vigorous imagination of Milton sunk under the weight; and this
author scruples not to declare, that the skirmishes of kites or crows
as much merited a particular narrative, as the confused transactions
and battles of the Saxon Heptarchy [e]. In order, however, to connect
the events in some tolerable measure, we shall