greatest names in their history for the whole of that period. With its advent in Britannia about the end of the fourth century Welsh national history commences, and with the death of its last important representative, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, in 1282, the first half of the same history closes.
The occupation of the northern and western portions of Britannia by Picts and Scots threw the old population of south-eastern Wales and the country between the Severn Sea and the Wiltshire Avon into a state of alarm. The Britons of the Devonian peninsula began to migrate in large numbers to Armorica on the mainland, where they founded Britanny. Already in 469 we find Apollinaris Sidonius speaking, as a matter of course, of the inhabitants of that region as Britons.[1] In this way the south-eastern portion of Britannia beyond the Severn Sea was thinned of its population and thereby made ready for the West Saxon victory of Deorham in 577, which brought the old Roman province of Upper Britain definitely to a close and at the same time exposed the whole of the Devonian peninsula to that process of Saxonization which does not even yet appear to be complete. The Britons west of the Severn, on the other hand, are found in the third decade of the fifth century torn into two factions, the one under the celebrated Vortigern and the other under Ambrosius Aurelianus or Emrys Wledig.[2]
- ↑ Hodgkin's Political Hist. of England to 1066, p. 106, and also note, where the reference is given as Ep. i. 7. See also Y Cymmrodor XI. 69.
- ↑ ' Guorthigirnus regnavit in Brittannia et dum ipse regnabat urgebatur a metu Pictorum Scottorumque et a Romanico impetu nec non et a timore Ambrosii.' Hist. Britt. c. 31 (Chr. Min. III.)
