When he makes this feeble people send an embassy
to a Roman in Gaul to say, "The barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea
throws us back on the barbarians: thus two modes of death await us; we
are either slain or drowned," we must wonder at the very straitened
limits in which this unhappy people were shut up.
Surely much of this is little more than the tumid rhetoric of the
cloister; for all the assumptions that have been raised of the physical
degeneracy of the people are quite unsupported by any real historical
evidence. M. Guizot considers it unjust and cruel to view their humble
supplications, so declared by Gildas, to Rome for aid, as evidences of
the effeminacy of that nation, whose resistance to the Saxons has given
a chapter to history at a time when history has few traces of Italians,
Spaniards, and Gauls.
That the representations of Gildas could only be partially true, as
applied to some particular districts, is sufficiently proved, by the
undoubted fact that within little more than twenty years from the date
of these cowardly demonstrations Anthemius, the Emperor, solicited the
aid of the Britons against the Visigoths; and twelve thousand men from
this island, under one of the native chieftains, Rhiothimus, sailed up
the Loire, and fought under the Roman command.
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