oins, pottery, brick, and inscriptions are found abundantly. Perhaps
also they held and transformed several of the great earth-camps for
their own uses, such as the Clovelly Dykes or the escarpments at
Ilfracombe, built by the Britons or some earlier people. But the
Romans do not appear to have settled in Devonshire as they did in East
Anglia and the Midlands; I believe there are few traces of their
dwellings, villas, roads, or baths, beyond Exeter in the West.

When their rule weakened and declined in the fifth century, certainly
Damnonia would be one of the first provinces over which their
jurisdiction waned, because of its inaccessibility, its deep wooded
valleys, the wastes of Exmoor and Dartmoor, and the danger of its
coasts; and we may well suppose that the old Celtic traditions and
customs continued here but little modified by the Roman occupation.

Then at some time in the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons came, but
they seem to have come to Devonshire more peaceably than in their
fierce raids on the south and east coasts; they came as Christians to
the Christian British, and though they conquered them, they did not
drive them out, nor compel them into mountain fastnesses, as the
earlier Saxon conquerors drove the British into Wales. So that in
Devon, though to a lesser degree than in Cornwall, and still less than
in Wales, there is a larger admixture of original Celtic blood than in
Kent, Sussex, Essex, and the counties of the Saxon heptarchy. But,
according to Westcote--who is, for all his discursiveness, no bad
authority--the Britons and the Saxons came to loggerheads; for the
government being Saxon, and the laws and the language, the poor Britons
could neither hear nor make themselves understood, and so took arms
against the settlers, and were by them driven "beyond the river now
called Taw-meer" (_i.e._, Tamar), and so out of Devon into Cornwall.
This was done by King Athelstan, after he had beaten the Welsh at
Hereford and subdued the Picts and Scots.

From this time forth, says Westcote, the Britons began to be called
"Corn-Welshmen or Cornishmen," and he gives an elaborate etymology of
the name, but adds that he need speak no further of Cornwall, "being
eased of that labour by the industrious labours of the right worthy and
worshipful gentleman Richard Carew, who . . . hath very eloquently
described it."

The Saxons, as we know, led a struggling and turbulent existence for
five or six centurie