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 by Thorpe and Kemble,
supply us with names some of which are assuredly not Teutonic, while
others are demonstrably Celtic; and these names are borne by people
occupying high positions at the court of English kings. Names of this
class occur even in Kent itself; while others are borne by members of
the royal family of Wessex. The local dialect of the West Riding of
Yorkshire still contains many Celtic words; and the shepherds of
Northumberland and the Lothians still reckon their sheep by what is
known as "the rhyming score," which is really a corrupt form of the
Welsh numerals from one to twenty. The laws of Northumbria mention the
Welshmen who pay rent to the king. Indeed, it is clear that even in the
east itself the English were from the first a body of rural colonists
and landowners, holding in subjection a class of native serfs, with whom
they did not intermingle, but who gradually became Anglicised, and
finally coalesced with their former masters, under the stress of the
Danish and Norman supremacies.

[3] Kemble "On Anglo-Saxon Names." Proc. Arch. Inst., 1845.

In the west, however, the English occupation took even less the form of
a regular colonisation. The laws of Ine, a West Saxon king, show us that
in his territories, bordering on yet unconquered British lands, the
Welshman often occupied the position of a rent-paying inferior, as well