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Reclaiming the English Tribes
But their hatred is comprehensible. Despoiled and dis-
placed by the newcomers the memory of the wrongs they
had suffered was still green. The Irish element in west-
ern Britain doubtless shared this sentiment of repulsion.
But the inactivity of the Irish in Ireland is less easily
comprehensible.
The antipathy of the Britons for the English invader
was implacable, and it endured even after the English
had become Christians. Bede sorrowfully remarks
respecting the intransigeance of the ancient Britons:
"Among other most wicked actions, not to be exprest,
which their own historian Gildas, mournfully takes notice
of, they added this that they never preached the faith to
the Saxons or English who dwelt amongst them." 1
A letter of Aldhelm to a ruler of Cornwall bears strik-
ing witness to the feeling which the dispossest Britons
continued to cherish towards the English tribes. "Beyond
the mouth of the Severn," he writes, "the priests of Cam-
bria, proud of the purity of their morals, have such a
horror of communication with us that they refuse to pray
with us in the churches, or to seat themselves at the same
table. More than this, what is left of our meals is thrown
to dogs and swine, the dishes and bottles we have used
have to be rubbed with sand or purified by fire before
they will condescend to touch them. The British neither
give us the salutation nor the kiss of peace, and if one
of us went to live in their country the natives would hold
no communication with him until after he had been made
to endure a penance of forty days." 2
Bede tells us further that to his day it was "the custom
of the Britons not to pay any respect to the faith and
i Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk. I, Ch. XXII.
2Epistola 1, Adhelmi ad Geruntium, Migne, Pat. Lat. LXXXIX, col. 87.
It was originally found among the letters of Boniface.
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