The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[Robert Vermaat]

Gildas, writing in the early 6th c. does not give one single hint that the Saxons drove either British or Christians before them to the West.

That's true, though Gildas gives no clues as to geography. His personal knowledge of the british isles too is suspect, hence he draws on unreliable sources for Hadrian's and the Antonine walls. british christian communities did survive though, even in Kent, hence the 'eccles' names. Eccles itself is a brythonic word borrowed into latin hence english uses a latinised welsh word to denote a community of british christians.

I would not say that Gildas had a bad knowledge of the British Isles. True, his historical knowledge of event further back than the 5th c. are unsound, but then he was not the only one who did not know who built the wWalls - I believe it was Orosius who thought that Severus builkt them. Gildas seems reliable enough for his own story, even when he like to speak in hyperbole often enough.

The survival of Christian communities in Kent, ánd the (eccles-)names for them, is one of those signs that for me speak against a mass migration in the early days of the Anglo-saxon arrival and a total population replacement in the east, as Coates advocates.

Härke suggests that a population crash occured in the immediate post roman period but that the romano british population remained stable from the mid 5th cent onwards.

Does he really? How strange - that would mean that the population took a sharp dive after Britain became independent (Gildas saw that as a happier time, I believe), and that is stabilised when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in (according to Härke, right?) a mass migration, driving all the British before them? I find that hard to believe. I think current thought has the British population already diminishing since the 3rd c., a curve that i could well accept becoming a bit steeper during the 5th c., with all the raids, civil wars and Anglo-Saxon migration starting. But I can't accept any idea that after 450 it became stable? With a the wars continuing right into the 7th c? How about that supposed plague of the mid-th c., we know that hit Britain too!

Another major consideration is the late roman marine transgression which altered the landscape considerably.

Yes, we know that already startyed during the Roman period. It must have been very problematic for the low-lying areas.