Welsh.

It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the
superiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, like
the Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to
a woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other
places taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the
approach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled
from east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that
of the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The
English hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in
that case some of the British women would be spared. It no more
required wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English
language and institutions in Britain than it required wholesale
slaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and a
large admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly be
denied.

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they
ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this
internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and
families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the
blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdoms
into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The
expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed in
Essex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was hemmed
in by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and their
tributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of the
anarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed the
supremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that each