forefathers, who had needed no aid but their own good right hands, they had become accustomed to look for protection to their Roman masters, and to delegate to others what they ought to have achieved themselves. Nor were the northern tribes their only foes. Besides their new invaders, they had to contend with gangs of Roman soldiers, who, cheated of their pay by their officers, infested the highways as robbers, and extorted provisions from the natives.[1]
State of the Britons when abandoned by the Romans. It might have been supposed that the Britons, improved in learning, in agriculture, in manufactures, and in the arts and sciences by four centuries of Roman instruction, would have become a great and flourishing people. They had, indeed, natural advantages superior to all their rivals, in the possession of some of the finest harbours in the world, of minerals, and of a soil as fruitful, if not more so than that of any of the countries around them. But while Rome had raised the Britons in the social scale, and imparted to them knowledge of the highest value for the development of their vast natural resources, she had, especially towards the close of her career, greatly weakened them, by the heavy drafts of their best sons for employment in local wars, or to be posted far away as garrisons in distant provinces. It is, therefore, probable that Rome left our forefathers comparatively poorer and, assuredly, in a weaker condition than they were when she usurped the government of their island.
- ↑ Bede places the final withdrawal of the Roman forces from England, and the consequent misfortunes which befell the native Britons, at just before the siege of Rome by Attila, A.D. 409. Eccles. Hist. i. c. 2. See also "Uriconium," by T. Wright. 8vo., 1872.
