It has been stated that the English were ‘a truly multiracial society’ because there were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Belgics, and ‘flamboyant Celts’ among their ancestors. The reader should note that all these peoples were not only of one race (Europid) but of one subrace (Nordid). Incidentally it is doubtful whether the Angles and Saxons were different peoples in any sense.
It follows from what has been said that the English are far from being ‘one of the most mongrel strains of the human race’. The facts can perhaps be best represented by use of a rough analogy. Let us suppose that a dog-breeder has been specializing in harriers (hounds for hare-hunting, an ancient breed). Let us suppose further that it occurs to him to mate some of his harriers with bloodhounds. He keeps his stock of harriers and makes a new hybrid breed of bloodhound-harriers. He gives some of each stock to a master of foxhounds. The master incorporates them in the breeding stock of his pack, and later introduces some otterhounds as well. Interbreeding for several generations eventually produces a varied but roughly homogeneous pack, all the ancestors of which were hounds of the long-eared group that hunts by scent.
No one, on seeing the pack, would say that these hounds were one of the most mongrel of all the strains of dogs. The man-in-the-street would simply say that they looked rather like foxhounds, while a huntsman would remark on the differences from typical members of the breed. The inexpert and the expert would agree, rightly, in describing a cross between a bull-dog and a greyhound, or between a Pekinese and a beagle, as a genuine specimen of one of the most mongrel of all the strains. Comparable examples could be quoted from mankind, but since the word ‘mongrel’ is disparaging when applied to man, it is far better to avoid it.
In the analogy just related, the Neolithic (Mediterranid) people are represented by the harriers; the Beaker Folk by the bloodhounds; the Iron Age invaders (Celtae and Belgae) by the foxhounds; and the Anglo-Saxons and other northerners by the otterhounds. Only the Beaker Folk were markedly different from the rest (though of the same race), just as the bloodhounds were among the dogs (though of the same group of breeds).
The people of a large part of Wales would be represented, in an analogy of this sort, by a pack of foxhounds to which the breeder of harriers had made a much bigger contribution of his unhybridized stock to the master of foxhounds than he did in the case just considered.