Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/100

 in the Severn Valley, in Devon, Somerset and Dorset. Thus North and West Britain is admittedly mainly Celtic.

Professor Huxley, after careful scientific investigations, pronounces the Severn Valley— Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire-more deeply Celtic than Ireland itself. In Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk), a large proportion of the population possess an unmistakably Celtic physique. Down to the Conquest there were principalities of Welshmen in Yorkshire; and throughout the extant laws of the Anglo- Saxon period we find constant references to the Welshmen who had been enslaved by the victorious invaders. The women were saved, for the invaders seldom imported women with them. The dwellers in the Roman-British cities were saved, and so were the rural Welshmen, as serfs and tillers of the soil and payers of rent. They were largely saved when the invaders were Christianised, and it is only in Sussex, Essex, Kent, Middlesex, Herefordshire, Hampshire and Surrey, which were conquered by barbaric, ruthless, and unregenerate Saxons,