In the cities, indeed, it would seem that the Britons remained in great numbers.  The Welsh bards complain that the urban race of Romanised natives known as Loegrians, “became as Saxons.”  Mr. Kemble has shown that the English did not by any means always massacre the inhabitants of the cities.  Mr. Freeman observes, “It is probable that within the [English] frontier there still were Roman towns tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied by them;” and Canon Stubbs himself remarks, that “in some of the cities there were probably elements of continuous life:  London, the mart of the merchants, York, the capital of the north, and some others, have a continuous political existence.”  “Wherever the cities were spared,” he adds, “a portion, at least, of the city population must have continued also.  In the country, too, especially towards the west and the debateable border, great numbers of Britons may have survived in a servile or half-servile condition.”  But we must remember that in only two cases, Anderida and Chester, do we actually hear of massacres; in all the other towns, Baeda and the Chronicle tell us nothing about them.  It is a significant fact that Sussex, the one kingdom in which we hear of a complete annihilation, is the very one where the Teutonic type of physique still remains the purest.  But there are nowhere any traces of English clan nomenclature in any of the cities.  They all retain their Celtic or Roman names.  At Cambridge itself, in the heart of the true English country, the charter of the thegn’s guild, a late document, mentions a special distinction of penalties for killing a Welshman, “if the slain be a ceorl, 2 ores, if he be a Welshman, one ore.”  “The large Romanised towns,” says Professor Rolleston, “no doubt made terms with the Saxons, who abhorred city life, and would probably be content to leave the unwarlike burghers in a condition of heavily-taxed submissiveness.”

Thus, even in the east it is admitted that a Celtic element probably entered into the population in three ways,—­by sparing the women, by making rural slaves of the men, and by preserving some, at least, of the inhabitants of cities.  The skulls of these Anglicised Welshmen are found in ancient interments; their descendants are still to be recognised by their physical type in modern England.  “It is quite possible,” says Mr. Freeman, “that even at the end of the sixth century there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence.”  Sir F. Palgrave has collected passages tending to show that parties of independent Welshmen held out in the Fens till a very late period; and this conclusion is admitted by Mr. Freeman to be probably correct.  But more important is the general survival of scattered Britons within the English communities themselves.  Traces of this we find even in Anglo-Saxon documents.  The signatures to very early charters,[3] collected