haracteristic
features, how does this law of population apply to Somersetshire?

It is clear from the repeated allusions to the Welsh in the laws of Ina,
King of the West Saxons, that in his kingdom the ancient inhabitants of
the country were not exterminated, but reduced to the condition of serfs.
Some appear to have been landowners; but in general they must have been
the servants of their Saxon lords, for we find the race, as in the case
of the negroes in the West Indies, to have been synonymous with the
servile class, so that a groom was called a _hors-wealh_, or horse
Welshman, and a maid-servant a _wylen_, or Welsh-woman. As long as
slavery was allowed by the law of the land--that is, during the
Anglo-Saxon period, and for two centuries at least after the
Conquest--there was probably no very intimate mixture of the two races.
The Normans, as, in comparison with the old inhabitants of the country,
they were few in number, cannot have very materially affected them. We
have, therefore, to consider what has become of them since--the Saxon
master and the Welsh slave. In the Eastern Counties the invaders seem to
have overwhelmed the natives, and destroyed or driven them further
inland. Here, in Somerset, their language continued to be spoken in the
time of Asser, the latter part of the 9th century; for he tells his
readers what Selwood and other places with Saxon names were called by the
Britons. We may infer from this mention of them that they were still
dispersed over these counties, and undoubtedly they still live in our
peasantry, and are traceable in the dialect. Now, is there any
peculiarity in this which we may seize as diagnostic of British descent?
I submit that we have in the West of Somerset and in Devonshire in the
pronunciation of the vowels; a much more trustworthy criterion than a
mere vocabulary. The British natives learnt the language that their
masters spoke, and this is nearly the same as in Wilts, Dorset,
Gloucester, Berks, and Hampshire, and seems to have formerly extended
into Kent. But they learnt it as the Spaniards learnt Latin: they picked
up the words, but pronounced them as they did their own. The accent
differs so widely in the West of Somerset and in Devonshire from that of
the counties east of them that it is extremely difficult for a native of
these latter to understand what our people are talking about, when they
are conversing with one another and unconscious of the presence of a