The Romans came, conquered, and departed, and left no mark except the ruins of their buildings. When the Saxons landed, Britain was once more a country of Celtic tribes living in a state of barbarism and mutual warfare.
That is a not much exaggerated account of the traditional English view of the matter, which one may find implied, even ifnot baldly stated, in most history books more than about thirty years old. Sometimes it was tempered by the doctrine that the Romans really had in some ways influenced the Britons, and that relics of this influence were to be seen in the city life and guild institutions of the Middle Ages; and sometimes, in such books as Gardiner's well-known history (1896), the fact that the Britons acquired a considerable degree of Roman culture is recognized, but the question of whether and why it disappeared when the Romans left is not raised at all. And the old traditional view is still predominant in such a deservedly popular book as Fletcher and Kipling's history and in Mr. Kipling's splendidly imaginative picture of late fourth-century Britain in Puck of Pook's Hill.
The essence of the traditional view is the notion that between Britons and Romans there was an initial cleavage of race, langauge, and culture which to the last was never really bridged. At the time of the original conquest, there was, of course, no difficulty in deciding whether a given man was a Briton or a Roman, and it has generally been assumed that this was true to the end. The Romans, it is assumed, were a conquering race and the Britons a conquered; one race was dark and Italian, the other fair and Celtic; one spoke Latin and the other Welsh; one was civilized and the other not. But this assumption is very far from true. Let us look at the facts.
A great deal of attention has recently been given to the determination of racial types by exact measurement. Differences of physical character are accompanied by differences of proportion between various parts of the skeleton; even the skull alone,
