nd property of its inhabitants, who then amounted
to eighty-seven families. He released them at once from spiritual and
temporal bondage; and two hundred and fifty slaves of both sexes were
baptized by their indulgent master. The kingdom of Sussex, which spread
from the sea to the Thames, contained seven thousand families; twelve
hundred were ascribed to the Isle of Wight; and, if we multiply this
vague computation, it may seem probable, that England was cultivated by
a million of servants, or villains, who were attached to the estates of
their arbitrary landlords. The indigent Barbarians were often tempted
to sell their children, or themselves into perpetual, and even foreign,
bondage; [152] yet the special exemptions which were granted to national
slaves, [153] sufficiently declare that they were much less numerous
than the strangers and captives, who had lost their liberty, or changed
their masters, by the accidents of war. When time and religion had
mitigated the fierce spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, the laws encouraged
the frequent practice of manumission; and their subjects, of Welsh
or Cambrian extraction, assumed the respectable station of inferior
freemen, possessed of lands, and entitled to the rights of civil
society. [154] Such gentle treatment might secure the allegiance of a
fierce people, who had been recently subdued on the confines of Wales
and Cornwall. The sage Ina, the legislator of Wessex, united the two
nations in the bands of domestic alliance; and four British lords of
Somersetshire may be honorably distinguished in the court of a Saxon
monarch. [155]

[Footnote 147: Carte's History of England, vol. i. p. 195. He quotes the
British historians; but I much fear, that Jeffrey of Monmouth (l. vi. c.
15) is his only witness.]

[Footnote 148: Bede, Hist. Ecclesiast. l. i. c. 15, p. 52. The fact is
probable, and well attested: yet such was the loose intermixture of
the German tribes, that we find, in a subsequent period, the law of the
Angli and Warini of Germany, (Lindenbrog. Codex, p. 479-486.)]

[Footnote 149: See Dr. Henry's useful and laborious History of Great
Britain, vol. ii. p. 388.]

[Footnote 150: Quicquid (says John of Tinemouth) inter Tynam et Tesam
fluvios extitit, sola eremi vastitudo tunc temporis fuit, et idcirco
nullius ditioni servivit, eo quod sola indomitorum et sylvestrium
animalium spelunca et habitatio fuit, (apud Carte, vol. i. p. 195.) From
bishop Nicholson (English Historical