fferent parts of the island. They came no longer as pirates, but
as invaders. Whilst the Britons contended with one body of their fierce
enemies, another gained ground, and filled with slaughter and desolation
the whole country from sea to sea. A devouring war, a dreadful famine, a
plague, the most wasteful of any recorded in our history, united to
consummate the ruin of Britain. The ecclesiastical writers of that age,
confounded at the view of those complicated calamities, saw nothing but
the arm of God stretched out for the punishment of a sinful and
disobedient nation. And truly, when we set before us in one point of
view the condition of almost all the parts which had lately composed the
Western Empire,--of Britain, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain, of Africa,--at
once overwhelmed by a resistless inundation of most cruel barbarians,
whose inhuman method of war made but a small part of the miseries with
which these nations were afflicted, we are almost driven out of the
circle of political inquiry: we are in a manner compelled to acknowledge
the hand of God in those immense revolutions by which at certain periods
He so signally asserts His supreme dominion, and brings about that great
system of change which is perhaps as necessary to the moral as it is
found to be in the natural world.

But whatever was the condition of the other parts of Europe, it is
generally agreed that the state of Britain was the worst of all. Some
writers have asserted, that, except those who took refuge in the
mountains of Wales and in Cornwall, or fled into Armorica, the British
race was in a manner destroyed. What is extraordinary, we find England
in a very tolerable state of population in less than two centuries after
the first invasion of the Saxons; and it is hard to imagine either the
transplantation or the increase of that single people to have been in so
short a time sufficient for the settlement of so great an extent of
country. Others speak of the Britons, not as extirpated, but as reduced
to a state of slavery; and here these writers fix the origin of personal
and predial servitude in England.

I shall lay fairly before the reader all I have been able to discover
concerning the existence or condition of this unhappy people. That they
were much more broken and reduced than any other nation which had fallen
under the German power I think may be inferred from two considerations.
First, that in all other parts of Europe the ancient language