75 



The case referred to was that of Exeter :* within which city, 

 we had been told by William of Malmesbury, that King 

 Athelstan had found the Cornish Britons and the English 

 settlers, living side by side, under " equal law." This had been 

 interpreted, by Sir Francis Palgrave, Mr. Kemble, and other 

 historians, as shewing that the river Exe, at the west of the 

 city, had till then divided the two nations. But an examination of 

 the still surviving dedications of the churches within that city made 

 it evident that the Britons, having been pressed by their 

 maritime invaders from the estuary, had maintained their hold 

 upon the northern half of the city, which ^ as divided by the 

 Roman Eoss-Way from the southern half held by the invading 

 Saxons. In this case the distinctive Cornish dedications were 

 St. Petrock, St. Kerian, St. Pancras, St. Paul (St. Pol de Leon, 

 a Cornishman), and one of each of two duplicate Catholic dedica- 

 tions, St. Mary and Allhallows. 



A hard and fast theory has almost reached the warmth of a 

 furor, with the most learned of our historical writers of later years, 

 that the present English nation is of purely Teutonic ancestry-; 

 that "our ancestors," as they delight to distinguish the intrud- 

 ing German nations, " entered upon a land whose defenders had 

 forsaken it " f : that, as some go so far as to say. the Celti c 

 populations were " exterminated," leaving to their subjugators 

 little or nothing more than ' ' the means of reproducing at liberty 

 on new ground the institutions under which they had lived at 

 home." The same unqualified assertion is also frequently quoted, 



*Celt and Teuton in Exeter. Archaoloqical Journal (Institute^ vol. xxx., 

 1874. 



t Prof. Stubbs, Engl. Const. History. If the question upon which we 

 are engaged had belonged only to the learned, such a declaration from so 

 great an authority would have silenced our enquiry at starting. But, as we 

 are all concerned with it, the appeal is open to us from things that are writ- 

 ten to things that are. 



