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.