ving
pirates lose their taste for maritime adventure; they build no more
ships; their intestine quarrels are food sufficient for what is left of
their warlike appetites. Whence comes it that the instincts of this
impetuous race are to some degree moderated? Doubtless from the quantity
and fertility of the land they had conquered, and from the facility they
found on the spot for turning that land to account. These facilities
consisted in the labour of others. The taste for agriculture did not
belong to the race. Tacitus represents the Germans as cultivating only
what was strictly necessary.[35] The Anglo-Saxons found in Britain wide
tracts of country tilled by romanised husbandmen; after the time of the
first ravages they recalled them to their toil, but assigned its fruits
to themselves. Well, therefore, might the same word be used by the
conquerors to designate the native Celt and the slave. They established
themselves in the fields, and superintended their cultivation after
their fashion; their encampments became boroughs: Nottingham,
Buckingham, Glastonbury, which have to the present day retained the
names of Germanic families or tribes. The towns of more ancient
importance, on the contrary, have retained Celtic or Latin names:
London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, Dover, Cirencester, Manchester,
&c.[36] The Anglo-Saxons did not destroy them, since they are still
extant, and only mingled in a feeble proportion with their population,
having, like all Germans, a horror of sojourning in cities. "They
avoided them, regarding them as tombs," they thought that to live in
towns was like burying oneself alive.[37] The preservation in England of
several branches of Roman industry is one proof more of the continuance
of city life in the island; had the British artisans not survived the
invasion, there would never have been found in the tombs of the
conquerors those glass cups of elaborate ornamentation, hardly
distinguishable from the products of the Roman glass-works, and which
the clumsy hands of the Saxon were certainly incapable of fusing and
adorning.[38]

The Britons, then, subsist in large numbers, even in the eastern and
southern counties, where the Germanic settlement was most dense, but
they subsist as a conquered race; they till the ground in the country,
and in the cities occupy themselves with manual labour. Wales and
Cornwall alone, in the isle of Britain, were still places of refuge for
independent Celts. The idio