From the Humber they conquered northward across Yorkshire, where the important city of York had been the capital of the Roman dominion, and where Constantine the Great had been proclaimed emperor of Rome. Thus they laid the foundation of what became their great kingdom of Northumbria, of which the present English county of Northumberland is but a remnant. The later predominance of Northumbria in arts and arms was doubtless the cause of bestowing upon all the conquered portion of the island the name which Chaucer spells "Englelond," the Engles' land-England. Others of the Engles spread along the course of the Trent, until the westward and southward advance of the Engles met the territories of the Saxons, and all the eastern, the central, and most of the southern portion of Britain had become the joint possession of the two invading peoples, while the kinship of the Jutes in Kent seems to have been fully recognized. Though their country later became the foremost seat of English learning, the Engles seem at this period to have kept no records of their conquests.

Thirty-six years after the Saxons had cut the British dominions in two at the Severn, Ethelfrith of Northumbria divided them once again, in 613, by the capture of Chester, near the northern border of Wales, looking out upon the Irish Sea. This was more than a century and a half after the AngloSaxon conquest of Britain began. This marked the end of the national existence of the Britons. The

broken remnants of their territory were afterwards conquered one by one.

The slowness of the Anglo-Saxon conquest was a momentous fact. The stubborn resistance which they met maintained the racial solidarity of the invaders. Their only security was in the truth of kindred to kindred. Their only reinforcements were from their kindred beyond the sea. The long contest kept them warriors. They were not secure, even in the lands they had conquered, except by the power and terror of their sword. Every Engle and Saxon must be ever and always a warrior. They could depend upon no foreign alliances, no hireling soldiery, but always and only upon their own strong arms. What they had taken they must keep, as they had won it, by force of arms.

It seems beyond a doubt that all the invaders in the early years of the conquest waged against the Britons exterminating war. Every victory was a massacre. Their spirit was that of Joshua when he called upon the sun and the moon to stand still, that Israel might complete the slaughter of the fugitive Amorites. The historian Green thus describes the sequel of the first great battle of invaders and natives in Kent:

"The victory of Aylesford (455) did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck the key-note of the whole English conquest of Britain. The massacre which followed the battle indicated at once the merciless nature of the struggle which had begun. While the wealthier Kentish landowners fled in panic over the sea, the poorer

Britons took refuge in hill and forest until hunger drove them from their lurking-places to be cut down or enslaved

by their conquerors. It was in vain that some sought shelter within the walls of their churches; for the rage of the English seems to have burnt fiercest against the clergy. The priests were slain at the altar, the churches fired, the peasants driven by the flames to fling themselves on a ring of pitiless steel."

-GREEN, "Short History of the English People," p. 11.

The invaders were utterly heathen. They doubtless looked upon the religion of the conquered as the worship of some local divinities that would fight against them, and they thought to break their power by destroying their shrines and their priesthood. Cities they knew not what to do with, and they hated them as possible strongholds of a returning enemy. Hence they desolated them with fire, leaving only crumbling walls and blackened ruins. When they captured Anderida, in 491, on the site of the modern Pevensey, their own chronicle tells us, "Aella and Cissa beset Anderida, and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterwards one Briton left." The British historian Gildas gives a thrilling account of the cruel destruction of British towns and the slaughter of the inhabitants by the "whelps of the barbarian lioness," and the hopeless overthrow, as he deemed it, of all culture and civilization. In the farthest northern sweep of the West Saxon invasion, in an ill-starred advance upon Chester in 584, the invaders sacked and burnt the Roman station at Uriconium or Viri

conium, "the white town of the valley," leaving but ranges of blackened ruins, sadly described by a British poet as "without fire, without light, without song," and the stillness broken only by the eagle's scream. After their great victory at Deorham, in 577, they destroyed Bath, which had been a famed watering-place under the Roman occupation. “The wild forest grew in the colonnades and the porches of the hot springs, over the Forum and the public buildings of the Romans." An English poet describes it two centuries afterwards in a pathetic fragment called "The Ruined Burg," said by Stopford Brooke to be "the only English poem which has any relation to the Conquest," and which he thus translates: "Wondrous is this wall of stone; Weirds (Fates) have shattered it!

Broken are the burg-steads, crumbled down the

work!

Fallen are the roof-beams, ruined are the towe All undone the door-pierced turrets; frozen de their plaster.

Shorn away and sunken down are the sheltering ments,

Under-eaten of Old Age! Earth is holding in These, the power-wielding workers; all fo forlorn in death are they.

Hard is the grip of the ground, while a hu tions

Move away.

All their battle-bulwarks bared to their fou
Crumbled is the castle keep."

Some modern historians, who are u admit that anything remarkable ever h

still less anything dramatic-insist that there could be no such thing as "the promiscuous slaughter of an entire people," and that, hence, the mass of the Britons must have become slaves of the conquerors, and in process of time have become amalgamated with them. But we need not fancy that the "entire people" would calmly wait in their homes for the invaders to come and mow them down or enslave them. A few massacres like that of Anderida, with "not one Briton left," would be enough: afterwards the population would flee far before the invaders' advance. So we find that, after the battle of Aylesford, those Britons who could flee crossed the Channel to Armorica, in northern France, in such numbers that in the year 461 they had a church and ishop of their own there, and by the middle of the th century so many refugees had come that they ged the name of the country, and Armorica had ny-the "Briton's land." There was tinual retreat toward Wales and st, as the invaders advanced from g population rapidly dwindles. oung men who might found in battle against the invader, idegroom and the voice of rd in the land. The old and the children, sink and exile. Sustenance ed or rendered imposnd this process per