Even Gildas, however, mentions that some of his countrymen, "constrained by famine, came and yielded themselves up to their enemies as slaves for ever;" while others, "committing the safeguard of their lives to mountains, crags, thick forests, and rocky isles, though with trembling hearts, remained in their fatherland." These passages certainly suggest that a Welsh remnant survived in two ways within the English pale, first as slaves, and secondly as isolated outlaws.
Baeda stands on a very different footing.

His authenticity is undoubted; his language is simple and straightforward.

He was born in or about the year 672, only two hundred years after the landing of the first English colonists in Thanet.

Scarcely more than a century separated him from the days of Ida.

The constant lingering warfare with the Welsh on the western frontier was still for him a living fact.