English believed their forefathers had acquired the land. Moreover,
these frightful details accord well enough with the vague generalities
of Gildas, from which, however, they may very possibly have been
manufactured. Yet even the Chronicle nowhere speaks of absolute
extermination: that idea has been wholly read into its words, not
directly inferred from them. A great deal has been made of the massacre
at Pevensey; but we hear nothing of similar massacres at the great Roman
cities–at London, at York, at Verulam, at Bath, at Cirencester, which
would surely have attracted more attention than a small outlying
fortress like Anderida. Even the Teutonic champions themselves admit
that some, at least, of the Celts were incorporated into the English
community. "The women," says Mr. Freeman, "would, doubtless, be largely
spared;" while as to the men, he observes, "we may be sure that death,
emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the
vanquished found at the hands of our fathers." But there is a vast gulf,
from the ethnological point of view, between exterminating a nation and
enslaving it.[2]

[2] In this and a few other cases, modern authorities are
quoted merely to show that the essential facts of a large
Welsh survival are really admitted even by those who most
strongly argue in favour of the general Teutonic origin of
Englishmen.

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