630 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



And where the obstinate resistance of the inhabitants may not have 

 provoked the invaders into cruelty, which would have been un- 

 natural, even in the notoriously cruel Saxon (see Salvian, cit. 

 Kingsley, * Roman and Teuton,' p. 46), the civilisation of the 

 former may very well have attained to such a level as to make them 

 think a retreat into Damnonia preferable to remaining on the same 

 spot with a race so destitute, as the Saxons were, both of the 

 means and appliances of the arts and manufactures which make 

 this life enjoyable, and of the beliefs which make the prospect of 

 another comforting. At Frilford the relics of Roman manufacture, 

 as well as other remains, show, as I have said, that a population 

 must have existed there previously to the Saxon invasion, which 

 was in the possession of a very considerable share of the material 

 and other elements of the civilisation of that period. The very 

 name of this Romanised settlement has been lost, and the Saxon 

 name Frilford, like that of Garford, a village a few hundred yards 

 distant, may possibly speak, as the Rev. Isaac Taylor, in his ^ Names 

 and Places,' has suggested with reference to Gateshead \ to the 

 destruction of a bridge by the worshippers of Frea. The name, 

 indeed, seems to point to the same explanation as the great number 

 of urns ; and to suggest that the very real heathenism of the 

 soldiers of Cerdic may have driven away a population who might 

 have acquiesced in submission to such professed Christians as the 

 soldiers of Clovis exhumed at Londinieres. Such a story as that 

 which Bede tells us ^ of the refusal of the British priests to eat in 

 company with the Saxons, even in his time, enables us to under- 

 stand in what abhorrence the Christians must have held them in 

 the days of cremation^. Some Lloegrians, as the Triads tell us*, 

 * became as Saxons ;' but many of the Celtic tribes, as their poems 

 show us, preferred emigration to submission and coalescence. The 

 large Romanised towns, no doubt, made terms with the Saxons, 

 who abhorred city life ^, and who would probably be content to 

 leave the unwarlike burghers in a condition of heavily-taxed 

 submissiveness. The villages would be more exposed to the violence 



^ See pp. 266, 267. Gateshead, however, may mean Caprae Caput. See Bede, 

 'H. E.' 

 ^ ' H. E.' ii. 4, 20. 

 ^ See also ' Crania Britannica,' p. 184, vol. i, and pi. xx. p. 3. 



* Pike, op. cit. p. 46. 



* See Pearson, op. cit. p. 264. 



