any sign of fear or apprehension as to external enemies on the part of Britannia, whence we may safely gather that Arthur had not lived in vain.
The old provincial system of Roman Britain, however, was of necessity doomed to disappear. It ran on for a while by means of the power which had set it in motion, but, as that power was generated from without and not from within, its cessation was bound to bring the system to an end. With the removal of external pressure, internal forces began to bear on the situation and later to control it. Chief among these in the Britannia of the west was the reappearance, and, as it were, the renewed activity of native and primitive modes of life such as those which Julius Caesar had attempted to portray five centuries before. These, of course, could not but have undergone modification, but they were not obliterated. There is evidence to show that archaic social conditions, such as are associated with matriarchy and totemism, still lingered on, notwithstanding the Roman regime and the growth of Christianity.[1] Throughout the fifth century we discern Wales dividing or already divided into a number of small kingdoms, which remain very much the same till Norman and post-Norman times. They war against one another, like the Saxons against the Jutes of Kent and Hampshire or against the Angles, the smaller and weaker kings seeking to preserve their independence, and the stronger kings anxious to make themselves paramount. Add to this the invasions from the west and north, the emigration of the Bretons,
- ↑ 1 Rhys and Jones's The Welsh People, 36-74 ; Y Cymmrodor XIX. 20-3.
