The signatures to very early charters,[3] collected by Thorpe and Kemble, supply us with names some of which are assuredly not Teutonic, while others are demonstrably Celtic; and these names are borne by people occupying high positions at the court of English kings.

Names of this class occur even in Kent itself; while others are borne by members of the royal family of Wessex.

The local dialect of the West Riding of Yorkshire still contains many Celtic words; and the shepherds of Northumberland and the Lothians still reckon their sheep by what is known as "the rhyming score," which is really a corrupt form of the Welsh numerals from one to twenty.

The laws of Northumbria mention the Welshmen who pay rent to the king.

Indeed, it is clear that even in the east itself the English were from the first a body of rural colonists and landowners, holding in subjection a class of native serfs, with whom they did not intermingle, but who gradually became Anglicised, and finally coalesced with their former masters, under the stress of the Danish and Norman supremacies.
[3] Kemble "On Anglo-Saxon Names." Proc.Arch.Inst., 1845.
In the west, however, the English occupation took even less the form of a regular colonisation.