"[*]
[* Gildas, Bede, lib. i. cap. 13. William of
Malmesbury, lib. i. cap. 1 Alured. Beverl. p. 45.]
But AEtius, pressed by the arms of Attila, the most terrible enemy that
ever assailed the empire, had no leisure to attend to the complaints of
allies, whom generosity alone could induce him to assist.[*]
[* Saxon Chron. p. 11, edit. 1692.]
The Britons, thus rejected, were reduced to despair, deserted their
habitations, abandoned tillage, and flying for protection to the forests
and mountains, suffered equally from hunger and from the enemy. The
barbarians themselves began to feel the pressures of famine in a country
which they had ravaged; and being harassed by the dispersed Britons, who
had not dared to resist them in a body, they retreated with their spoils
into their own country.[*]
[* Alured. Beverl, p. 45.]
The Britons, taking advantage of this interval, returned to their usual
occupations; and the favorable seasons which succeeded, seconding their
industry, made them soon forget their past miseries, and restored
to them great plenty of all the necessaries of life. No more can be
imagined to have been possessed by a people so rude, who had not,
without the assistance of the Romans, art of masonry sufficient to raise
a stone rampart for their own defence; yet the monkish historians,[*]
who treat of those events, complain of the luxury of the Britons
during this period, and ascribe to that vice, not to their cowardice or
improvident counsels, all their subsequent calamities.
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