"Almost to the close of the 6th century the English conquest of Britain was a sheer dispossession of the conquered people; and, so far as the English sword in these earlier days reached, Britain became England, a land, that is, not of Britons, but of Englishmen. There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant the general slaughter of the men who held it, or to account for such a slaughter by supposed differences between the temper of the English and those of other conquerors. ... The displacement of the conquered people was only made possible by their own stubborn resistance, and by the slow progress of the conquerors in the teeth of it. Slaughter no doubt there was on the battlefield or in towns like Anderida, whose long defence woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the most part the Britons cannot have been slaughtered; they were simply defeated and drew back." _J. R. Green, The Making of England, chapter 4._ The view strongly stated above, as to the completeness of the erasure of Romano-British society and influence from the whole of England except its southwestern and north· western counties, by the English conquest, is combated as strongly by another less prominent school of recent historians, represented, for example, by Mr. Henry C. Coote (The Romans of Britain) and by Mr. Charles H. Pearson, who says: "We know that fugitives from Britain settled largely during the 5th century in Armorica and in Ireland; and we may perhaps accept the legend of St. Ursula as proof that the flight, in some instances, was directed to the more civilized parts of the continent. But even the pious story of the 11,000 virgins is sober and credible by the side of that history which assumes that some million men and women were slaughtered or made homeless by a few ship-loads of conquerors." _C. H. Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, volume 1, chapter 6._ The opinion maintained by Prof. Freeman and Mr. Green (and, no less, by Dr. Stubbs) is the now generally accepted one. ENGLAND: 7th Century. The so-called "Heptarchy."