The Saxon invasion which, during the fifth and sixth centuries, reduced the Britons to a state of servitude, or drove them to the more inaccessible and remote regions of Wales and Cornwall, was the immediate cause of a great exodus to Armorica. No event in British history proved more fruitful in results: no event is more suggestive for the purpose of elucidating Cornish Church history. How large was the share taken in that emigration by the people of Dumnonia (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset) may be gathered from the fact that the language which the emigrants introduced into Armorica—a language which speedily superseded Latin just as Latin had superseded Gaulish—was Cornish rather than Welsh, the language, in short, which survived in some parts of Cornwall until the eighteenth century and which is, with some slight modification, still spoken in Finistère and to some extent in Morbihan and Côtes du Nord. Professor Loth, whose eminence as a Celtic scholar no one will dispute, has written, “it is certain that linguistically the Britons of Cornwall were nearer of kin to the emigrants than the Welsh: they doubtless occupied the nearer neighbourhood of ancient Dumnonia.” “The Breton language forms with Cornish a closely compacted unity as opposed to Welsh, although the three languages were assuredly very near neighbours at this period” (the fifth century).[43] Armorica itself became known as Brittany in the sixth century. Cornwall (Cornouaille) was adopted as the name of that portion of it between the Elorn and the Ellé soon afterwards. Dumnonia was the name given to the northern portion between the Elorn and the Cuesnon in the ninth century. The settlers in Armorica introduced their own form of Christianity, and the object of the British and Irish missionary saints who flocked thither soon afterwards was not, as ancient writers have supposed, in order to convert the pagan Gauls, but rather to administer to the spiritual needs of their compatriots. To these missions our Dumnonia contributed little in comparison with Wales. Cornwall after the foundation of the kingdom of Wessex in 519 became isolated: its relations with Brittany were doubtless closer than with Saxonised Britain. But it never became, like Wales and Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, a great missionary centre. The founders of the Breton monastery-bishoprics—Pol Aurelian, Lunaire, Magloire, Mewan and Malo were all Welsh: Tutwal only, the founder of Tréguier, was of British Dumnonia. Of the British saints whose names are found in the parishes, fractions of parishes and holy places of Brittany, from 80 to 90 are Welsh; about 60 appear in Cornwall; from 30 to 40 appear only in Brittany and in Cornwall and Devon, and a few in Somerset.[44]