s us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we
are either slain or drowned," we must wonder at the very straitened
limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.

Surely much of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the
cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical
degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical
evidence. M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble
supplications, so declared by Gildas, to Rome for aid, as evidences of
the effeminacy of that nation, whose resistance to the Saxons has given
a chapter to history at a time when history has few traces of Italians,
Spaniards, and Gauls.

That the representations of Gildas could only be partially true, as
applied to some particular districts, is sufficiently proved, by the
undoubted fact that within little more than twenty years from the date
of these cowardly demonstrations Anthemius, the Emperor, solicited the
aid of the Britons against the Visigoths; and twelve thousand men from
this island, under one of the native chieftains, Rhiothimus, sailed up
the Loire, and fought under the Roman command. They are described by a
contemporary Roman writer as quick, well-armed; turbulent and
contumacious from their bravery, their numbers, and their common
agreement. These were not the people who were likely to have stood upon
a wall to be pulled down by hooked weapons. They might have been the
people who had clung, more than the other inhabitants of the Roman
provinces, to their original language and customs; but it is not
improbable that they would have been of the mixed races with whom Rome
had been in more intimate relations, and to whom she continued to render
offices of friendship after the separation of the island province from
her empire.

Amid all this conflict of testimony there is the undoubted fact that
out of the Roman municipal institutions had risen the establishment of
separate sovereignties, as Procopius relates. Britain, according to St.
Jerome, was "a province fertile in tyrants." The Roman municipal
government was kept compact and uniform under a great centralizing
power. It fell to pieces here, as in Gaul, when that power was
withdrawn. It resolved itself into a number of local governments without
any principle of cohesion. The vicar of the municipium became an
independent ruler and head of a little republic; and that his authority
was contested by some