TO ETIUS, THRICE CONSUL, THE ROMAN LIEUTENANT IN GALLIA; THE LAMENTABLE COMPLAINT OF THE BRITAINS.

“WHEN FIRST OUR ANCESTORS BECAME subjects to the Romans, they judged the Senate of Rome by their worthy acts and glorious achievements, to have been a safe refuge and support to all who submitted to them; but we their posterity, by the pernicious designs of the tyrant Maximin, have been deprived of all means for our safety and resistance, whereby we are in great danger of losing both our kingdom and our lives, by the terrible invasions of our most cruel enemies the Scots and Picts. In this our deplorable condition we humbly applied ourselves to the Roman empire for succour, with assured confidence of relief, according as our faithfulness and loyalty hath deserved; notwithstanding which, we find ourselves utterly neglected and disregarded, so that we are delivered up as a prey to those barbarous nations to be ruined, destroyed, and murdered at their pleasure, whereby it is evident, either that the Romans have lost their former virtue and gallantry, or else that their most large empire is by the wrath of Heaven given up to be over-run by a foreign people. But if it be now the fatal time wherein the kingdom of Britain is irrecoverably to be taken from the Romans, and brought under the subjections of some barbarous nation, we declare that we neither abhor nor refuse the government of any, the Scots and Picts, the most cruel of all others, only excepted; of whose un mercifulness we have long since tasted, and by their renewed strength, after the loss of our goods, and our walls being destroyed, we know not how to secure our lives; for now they violently rush in upon us, they destroy our fields, burn our houses, towns and villages, beat down and raze to the ground our castles and towers; their bloody swords spare neither innocent children, women, nor impotent old age, besides vast numbers of men whom they have slain fighting in their own defence; and for the poor remainder of our nation, they are driven to the sea, and because they can get no passage over, are again forced back upon their adversaries, so that we are hereby doubly destroyed, being either drowned by the raging floods, or else murdered by our bloody enemies: therefore if the honour of the Roman empire, if our fidelity thereto for above five hundred years have any power to move you to consid