Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/282

Rh 270 ENGLAND [HISTORY. The Jutish settle ments. The Saxon settle ments. South- Saxons West- Saxons. East- Saxons. The Anglian settle ments. history. The Jutes, the first to settle, occupied the smallest part of the country. Their dominions took in only Kent with perhaps for a while Surrey, and Wight with a small part of the neighbouring mainland of Hampshire. They were hemmed in on all sides by the Saxon settlements, all of which bore the Saxon name. Suthsexe, Westsexe, Eastsexe, have been softened in modern speech into Sussex, Wessex, and Essex ; but the names are strictly not terri torial, but tribal. Weslsexe and the rest are all of them names, not of a land, but of a people. The whole of the Saxon settlements were made on the southern and south eastern coasts ; and it was the West-Saxons only who at any time carried their conquests to any distance inland. The South-Saxon settlement came next after the Jutish settlement in Kent. The date given to it is 477. The most remarkable event in the process of conquest was the storming of Anderida, now Pevensey, in 491. The forsaken walls of the Roman city still bear witness to the day when ^Elle and Cissa slew all that v/ere within, and when not a Bret was left behind. But the South-Saxons found a natural frontier to the north in the great wood of An derida. Their kingdom always remained little more than a long strip of coast, cut off to a great extent from the other kingdoms of Britain, and playing but a small part in their general history. It still keeps its name and boundary as the modern county of Sussex. The kingdom of the Gewissas or West-Saxons, founded to the west of the South-Saxons, was destined to hold quite another place in English and British history. Two Saxon ealdormen, Cerdic and Cynric, founded in 495 a settlement on the coast of what is now Hampshire. That settlement grew into the kingdom of England. Twenty-four years after their first landing, the two Saxon ealdormen deemed their position strong enough, and their conquests wide enough, for them to assume the kingly title. Thus began the royal line of the West-Saxons, which became the royal line of England. The third Saxon settlement, that of the East- Saxons, has no such definite date given to its foundation : but it certainly began not later than the first half of the sixth century. Like Sussex, it never extended itself far in land ; but it derived some importance from it:? containing two of the great cities of Roman Britain. One was Camu- lodunum or Colchester ; the other was London. But London, with its district of the Middle-Saxons, grew, by virtue of its admirable position, to a greatness which gave it a separate being. The city of ship^, on its broad river, remained as a great prize to be striven for by every con queror, rather than as a lasting and integral possession of any one of the English kingdoms. The settlements of the Angles, who in course of time occupied a much larger part of the land to which they gave their name than was occupied by the Saxons, have quite another history from the kingdoms of which we have just spoken. In Kent, in Sussex, in Wessex, the chief who leads the settlement is himself the founder of the kingdom. In the case of Kent and Sussex, the kingdom never permanently outgrew the bounds of the earliest conquests. Theboundaries of Wessex advanced and fell back and advanced again ; but they advanced by the process of bringing fresh con quests, newly won from the Briton, under the rule of the already existing kingly house of Wessex. The Anglian kingdoms grew in another way. We know, in some cases at least, the names of their first kings ; but those first kings do not appear as the first leaders of settlers from beyond sea. It would rather seem as if a crowd of small settle ments, of the date and circumstances of whose foundation we can say nothing, each doubtless ruled by its own ealdorman or petty king, were gradually grouped together into several considerable kingdoms. It is perfectly possible, though there is no evidence for the belief, that some of these original settlements may have actually been of earlier date than the landing of Cerdic, of ^lle, or of Hengebt. What is certain is that these Anglian states do not appear as organized kingdoms till a later time than Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. The chief Anglian powers were four. The East-Angles occupied the land to the north of the East- Ea# Saxons, a land which the vast fen region to the west of it -Any made in those times, if not insular, at least peninsular. North of the Htimber arose two kingdoms, Bernicia and Bc Deira, whose union at a later time formed the mighty realm of Northumberland, stretching from the Humber to the Forth. Ida, who in 547 gathered together a number of scattered Anglian settlements into the kingdom of Bernicia. is the one Anglian prince during the first stage of conquest who stands out with a personal being like that of the Saxon add Jutish founders. From his fortress on the basaltic rock of Bamburgh, overhanging the German Ocean, he ruled the eastern seaboard from Tees to Forth. Of the founder of the kingdom of Deira to the south of Bernicia we have no /x-&amp;lt; such clear mention, nor do we know when or by what means that kingdom won the possession which gave it its chief importance. This was the former capital of Roman Britain, Eboracinn, Eoforwic, or York. Of the process cf conquest in central England we know even less. We kno - .v absolutely nothing of the circumstances under which the land was won from the Briton. A crowd of Anglian tribes, which kept more or less of separate existence till a very late time, were gradually brought undiT the dominion of a single Anglian power. This power, as growing up on the Gr British frontier, took the name of Mcrce, the men of the of mark or border, and the name of Jfercia gradually spread ^ e over all central England. The date of the beginning of the Mercian kingdom is fixed as late as 584. But this of course does not mean a fresh settlement from beyond son, but simply the gathering together of several small settle- meats so as to form one considerable power. The bound aries of the true Mercian kingdom may be traced by the boundaries of the old diocese of Lichfield; but it could not have reached to anything like this extent so early as 584. Here then we have, among a crowd of smaller states, a Fin few kingdoms, seven or eight in number, which stand out pi e prominently, and fill a place in the history of Britain. &quot; 1 Among these again, a smaller number stand out at different O O times as aspiring, with more or less of success, to the general supremacy of the country. In all cases where a mi tuber of kindred but independent states lie near together, a supremacy of one kind or another is sure to come, either by force or by consent, to some one among the number, in which the rest are, more or less quickly, more or less thoroughly, merged. Thus, in modern Europe, France grew into Gaul, and Castile grew into Spain; thus in our own day Piedmont has grown into Italy, and Prussia has gone far towards growing into Germany. So in the end Wessex grew into England ; but it was not till after many struggles, many ups and downs, many changes of frontier, that the house of Cerdic became the royal house over the whole land. Three, or at most four, of the greater Teutonic kingdoms in Britain became serious competitors for the general supremacy over all the settlements of the race. Kent, small in geographical extent, had the start in order of time, and was in many ways favoured bv position. But any effective supremacy on the part of Kent belongs only to an early stage of English occupation ; the powers among which the supremacy was really disputed were the great Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the great Anglian king dom of Northumberland, formed by.the union of Bernicia ami Deira, and the Anglian kingdom of Mercia, which formed itself in the space between them. It would seem that, sometimes at least, a supremacy of some kind on the part of one kingdom over the whole or part of the rest was