228 NATUEE STUDIES. 



Similar dark people are also common among the sup- 

 posed pure English of Lincolnshire and East Anglia ; 

 while they are not infrequent in the oldest settled 

 parts of Wessex, about Hampshire, Wiltshire, and the- 

 Isle of Wight. In fact, there is good ethnological 

 reason for believing that, even in this most English 

 art of England, the first Teutons did not wholly 

 drive away the Britons, but conquered and enslaved 

 some of them. This belief is fully countenanced 

 by the few historians who have handed down to us 

 some meagre traditional account of the English set- 

 tlement; for both the Welsh monk, Gildas, who 

 wrote a hundred years after the landing of the English 

 in Kent, and the English monk, Baeda, who wrote 

 nearly a century later, inform us that some of the 

 Britons gave themselves up as slaves to their con- 

 querors. No doubt such slaves would be quickly 

 Teutonised in creed, and Anglicised in speech; but 

 from the ethnological point of view a Euskarian is a 

 Euskarian still, whatever religion he may happen to 

 profess, or whatever language he may happen to speak. 

 His tongue or faith would produce no immediate 

 change in the colour of his skin and eyes. To this 

 day, indeed, the darker people in the east of England 

 are mainly to be found among the peasantry. 



The midland districts of England were slowly con- 

 quered by the English, setting out from their earliest 

 colonies on the coast ; and as they moved inward, they 

 appear to have spared more and more of the native 

 Britons at each advance, and even to have substituted 



