o 601, so far as the
dates are known. Llanafanfawr was merged in Llanbadarn, and that again in
St. David's. These dates correspond well with the traditional dates of the
final flight of Christian Britons to Wales, under the pressure of Saxon
conquest. We may, I think, fairly regard this as the remodelling of the
British Church, which once had covered the greater part of the island, in
the narrow corner into which it had now been driven. It is to Bangor, St.
Asaph, St. David's, and Llandaff, that we are to look, if we wish to see
the ecclesiastical descendants of Restitutus and Eborius and Adelfius, who
in 314 ruled the British Church in those parts of the island which we call
England and Wales, with their seats or sees at London, York, and Caerleon.

When we come to consider the flight of the Christian Britons before the
Saxon invaders, it is worth while to consider how far Christianity really
had occupied the land generally, even at the date of its highest
development. The Britons were rather sturdy in their paganism. Their
Galatian kinsfolk were pagans still in the fourth century, to a large
extent. Their kinsfolk in Gaul were pagans to a large extent as late as
350. It seems to me not improbable that a good many of the Britons stayed
behind when the Christian Britons fled before the heathen Saxons; and that
the flocks whom British bishops led to places of safety, in Britany and
the mountains of Britain, may have been not very numerous. If on the whole
the fugitives were chiefly from the municipal centres, places so
completely destroyed as their ruins prove them to have been, the few
Christians left in the country places would easily relapse. But they would
retain the Christian tradition; and from them or their children would come
such information as that which enabled Wilfrid to identify, and recover
for Christ, the sacred places of British Christianity.

We should, I think, make a serious mistake if we supposed that the British
Church in Cornwall and Devon was originally formed by fugitives from other
parts of the island. The monuments seem to shew that Christianity was
established there as well as in other parts of Britain in Romano-British
times. Such monuments as we find there and in Wales do not exist in other
parts of the island where the British Church existed; and it is an
interesting and important question, is that because these parts were
unlike the other parts, or is it because in other parts the processes