book 3, chapter 10.

BRITAIN: A. D. 410. Abandoned By The Romans.

"Up to the moment ... when the Imperial troops quitted Britain, we see them able easily to repel the attacks of its barbarous assailants. When a renewal of their inroads left Britain weak and exhausted at the accession of the Emperor Honorius, the Roman general Stilicho renewed the triumphs which Theodosius had won. The Pict was driven back afresh, the Saxon boats chased by his galleys as far as the Orkneys, and the Saxon Shore probably strengthened with fresh fortresses. But the campaign of Stilicho was the last triumph of the Empire in its western waters. The struggle Rome had waged so long drew in fact to its end; at the opening of the fifth century her resistance suddenly broke down; and the savage mass of barbarism with which she had battled broke in upon the Empire. ... The strength of the Empire, broken everywhere by military revolts, was nowhere more broken than in Britain, where the two legions which remained quartered at Richborough and York set up more than once their chiefs as Emperors and followed them across the channel in a march upon Rome. The last of these pretenders, Constantine, crossed over to Gaul in 407 with the bulk of the soldiers quartered in Britain, and the province seems to have been left to its own defence; for it was no longer the legionaries, but 'the people of Britain' who, 'taking up arms,' repulsed a new onset of the barbarians. ... They appealed to Honorius to accept their obedience, and replace the troops. But the legions of the Empire were needed to guard Rome itself: and in 410 a letter of the Emperor bade Britain provide for its own government and its own defence. Few statements are more false than those which picture the British provincials as cowards, or their struggle against the barbarian as a weak and unworthy one. Nowhere, in fact, through the whole circuit of the Roman world, was so long and so desperate a resistance offered to the assailants of the Empire. ... For some thirty years after the withdrawal of the legions the free province maintained an equal struggle against her foes. Of these she probably counted the Saxons as still the least formidable. .... It was with this view that Britain turned to what seemed the weakest of her assailants, and strove to find ... troops whom she could use as mercenaries against the Pict."

_J. R. Green, The Making of England, introduction._

ALSO IN: _J. M. Lappenberg, History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, volume 1, pages 57-66._

BRITAIN: A. D. 446. The Last Appeal To Rome.

"Yet once again a supplicating embassy was sent to the Roman general Ætius, during his third consulship, in the year 446. ... Ætius was unable to help them."

_J. M. Lappenberg, History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, page 63._

"The date of the letters of appeal is fixed by the form of their address: 'The groans of the Britons to Ætius for the third time Consul. The savages drive us to the sea and the sea casts us back upon the savages: so arise two kinds of death, and we are either drowned or slaughtered.' The third Consulate of Aetius fell in A. D. 446, a year memorable in the West as the beginning of a profound calm which preceded the onslaught of Attila. The complaint of Britain has left no trace in the poems which celebrated the year of repose; and our Chronicles are at any rate wrong when they attribute its rejection to the stress of a war with the Huns. It is possible, indeed, that the appeal was never made, and that the whole story represents nothing but a rumour current in the days of Gildas among the British exiles in Armorica."

_C. Elton, Origins of English History, chapter 12._

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BRITAIN: A. D. 449-633. The Anglo-Saxon Conquest.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 449-473, to 547-633.

BRITAIN: 6th CENTURY. The Unsubdued Britons.

"The Britons were soon restricted to the western parts of the island, where they maintained themselves in several small states, of which those lying to the east yielded more and more to Germanic influence; the others protected by their mountains, preserved for a considerable time a gradually decreasing independence. ... In the south-west we meet with the powerful territory of Damnonia, the kingdom of Arthur, which bore also the name of West Wales. Damnonia, at a later period, was limited to Dyvnaint, or Devonshire, by the separation of Cernau, or Cornwall. The districts called by the Saxons those of the Sumorsætas, of the Thornsætas (Dorsetshire). and the Wiltsætas were lost to the kings of Dyvnaint at an early period; though for centuries afterwards a large British population maintained itself in those parts among the Saxon settlers, as well as among the Defnsætas, long after the Saxon conquest of Dyvnaint, who for a considerable time preserved to the natives of that shire the appellation of the 'Welsh kind.' Cambria (Cymru), the country which at the present day we call Wales, was divided into several states." The chief of these early states was Venedotia (Gwynedd), the king of which was supreme over the other states. Among these latter were Dimetia (Dyved), or West Wales; Powys, which was east of Gwynedd and Snowdon mountain; Gwent (Monmouthshire) or South-east Wales, the country of the Silures. "The usages and laws of the Cambrians were in all these states essentially the same. An invaluable and venerable monument of them, although of an age in which the Welsh had long been subject to the Anglo-Saxons, and had adopted many of their institutions and customs, are the laws of the king Howel Dda, who reigned in the early part of the 10th century. ... The partition of Cambria into several small states is not, as has often been supposed, the consequence of a division made by king Rodri Mawr, or Roderic the Great, among his sons. ... Of Dyfed, during the first centuries after the coming of the Saxons, we know very little; but with regard to Gwynedd, which was in constant warfare with Northumbria and Mercia, our information is less scanty: of Gwent, also, as the bulwark of Dimetia, frequent mention occurs. On the whole we are less in want of a mass of information respecting the Welsh, than of accuracy and precision in that which we possess. ... An obscurity still more dense than that over Wales involves the district lying to the north of that country, comprised under the name of Cumbria."

_J. M. Lappenberg, History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, volume 1, page 119-122._

See CUMBRIA AND STRATH-CLYDE.

BRITAIN: A. D. 635. Defeat Of The Welsh By The English Of Bernicia.

See HEVENFIELD, BATTLE OF THE.

BRITAIN: End----------

BRITAIN, GREAT: ADOPTION Of The Name For The United Kingdoms Of England And Scotland.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1707.

BRITAIN, Roman Walls In.

See ROMAN WALLS IN BRITAIN.

BRITANNIA, The Origin Of The Name.

"Many are the speculations which have been started as to the etymology of the word Britannia, and among the later ones have been some of the most extraordinary. Yet surely it is not one of those philological difficulties which we need despair of solving. Few persons will question that the name Britannia is connected with the name Britanni, in the same way as Germania, Gallia, Graecia, &c., with Germani, Galli, Graeci, &c., and it is not unreasonable to assume that Britanni was originally nothing more than the Latinized form of the Welsh word Brython, a name which we find given in the Triads to one of the three tribes who first colonized Britain. ... From the Welsh 'brith' and Irish 'brit,' parti-coloured, may have come Brython, which on this hypothesis would signify the painted men. ... As far then as philology is concerned, there seems to be no objection to our assuming Brython, and therefore also Britanni, to signify the painted men. How this Celtic name first came to denote the inhabitants of these islands is a question, the proper answer to which lies deeper than is generally supposed. ... The 'Britannic Isles' is the oldest name we find given to these islands in the classical writers. Under this title Polybius (3. 57) refers to them in connection with the tin-trade, and the well-known work on the Kosmos (c. 3) mentions 'The Britannic Isles, Albion and Ierne.' ... But in truth neither the authorship nor the age of this last-named work has been satisfactorily settled, and therefore we cannot assert that the phrase 'The Britannic Isles' came into use before the second century B. C. The name Britannia first occurs in the works of Cæsar and was not improbably invented by him."

_E. Guest, Origines Celticæ, volume 2, chapter 1._

The etymology contended for by Dr. Guest is scouted by Mr. Rhys, on principles of Celtic phonology. He, on the contrary, traces relations between the name Brython and "the Welsh vocables 'bethyn,' cloth, and its congeners," and concludes that it signified "a clothed or cloth-clad people."

_J. Rhys, Celtic Britain, chapter 6._

BRITANNIA PRIMA AND SECUNDA.

See BRITAIN: A. D. 323-337.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Aboriginal inhabitants.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: ATHAPASCAN FAMILY.

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BRITISH COLUMBIA: A. D. 1858-1871. Establishment of provincial government. Union with the Dominion of Canada.

"British Columbia, the largest of the Canadian provinces, cannot be said to have had any existence as a colony until 1858. Previous to that year provision had been made by a series of Acts for extending the Civil and Criminal Laws of the Courts of Lower and Upper Canada over territories not within any province, but otherwise the territory was used as a hunting ground of the Hudson's Bay Company. The disputes and difficulties that arose from the influx of miners owing to the gold discoveries in 1856, resulted in the revocation of the licence of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the passing of the Imperial Act 21 & 22 Vic., c. 99, to provide for the government of British Columbia. ... Sir James Douglas was appointed Governor and by his commission he was authorised to make laws, institutions and ordinances for the peace, order and good government of British Columbia, by proclamation issued under the public seal of the colony. ... The Governor continued to legislate by proclamation until 1864, when his proclamations gave way to Ordinances passed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Legislative Council. ... Up to this time the Governor of British Columbia was also Governor of the neighbouring island of Vancouver. Vancouver's Island is historically an older colony than British Columbia. Though discovered in 1592 it remained practically unknown to Europeans for two centuries, and it was not until 1849, when the island was granted to the Hudson's Bay Company, that a Governor was appointed. ... In 1865 the legislature of the island adopted a series of resolutions in favour of union with British Columbia, and by the Imperial Act 29 & 30 Vic. (i), c. 67, the two colonies were united. ... By an Order in Council dated the 16th day of May, 1871, British Columbia was declared to be a province of the Dominion [see CANADA: A. D. 1867, and 1869-1873] from the 20th of July, 1871."

_J. E. C. Munro, The Constitution of Canada, chapter 2._

ALSO IN: _H. H. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States,