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NOTES ' AND QUERIES. [9 th s. VIIL AUG. 3, 1001.

the "30 legions" of Penda's great army a Winwaed and the 30,000 hides attributed to Mercia. A combined expedition is mentionec in the * Chronicle ' under the year 743, when "Ethelbald, King of the Mercians, and Cuth- red, King of the West Saxons, fought against the Welsh."

2 Its date. While the notion that there were 100,000 hides in England south of the Humber, of which the Mercians and East Anglians had 30,000 each, and the Saxon and men of Kent the rest, may be older, it seems impossible to date the table previously given earlier than 661, when Wulf here overran the Isle of Wight and took possession of it. This then gives the earlier limit ; the later is more difficult to fix, but the date 673-86. already suggested by the delimitations of the dioceses and the removal of St. Birin's remains to Winchester, is supported by a statement in Florence of Worcester. This is that Ethelred of Mercia (675-704) consulted with Archbishop Theodore (669-90) about a division of the great Mercian diocese, and that the archbishop in 679 made five dio- ceses out of it Lichfield, Leicester, Lindsey, Worcester, and Dorchester (for South Anglia). In the last-named see he placed "Eata, a man of singular worth and sanctity, from the monastery of the Abbess Hilda." Bede also (iy. 23) mentions Eda as appointed to the bishopric of Dorchester. If the statement of Florence can be relied upon, Dorchester must have been within the Mercian boundaries before 679, and therefore probably within Wulfhere's lifetime, for Ethelred, though quite able to resist invasion, does not appear- to have been aggressive, and finally became a monk. There is a controversy as to whether this Eda (otherwise TEtla) or Eata should be identified with Heddi or Headdi, Bishop of Winchester (676 703), who translated St. Birin to Winchester and is said to have obtained the sanction of Pope Agatho (678-82) for the transference of the see from Dorchester to Winchester. But he may well be the same as Hedda or Headdi, Bishop of Lichfield (691-721), mentioned in the 'Life of St. Guth- lac.' The whole story seems to indicate that the West Saxon bishop (henceforward the Bishop of Winchester) had ceased to have any authority beyond the Thames, so that Oxfordshire had become Mercian both civilly and ecclesiastically. Hence 'The Tribal Hidage,' which places Widerigga, fec., among the West Saxon lands, must have been com- piled before 679. The ''synod of his own nation" at which St. Aldhelm was com- missioned to write against the British Easter is said to have been held in 685 at Burford in

Oxfordshire, with the Mercian kings Ethelred and Berthwald present. This is somewhat ambiguous, for Aldhelm was a West Saxon.

3. Editions. But if the first edition, as given in the table in the former article, belongs to the period 661-79, it would appear from the manuscript copies extant that a second edition must have been made soon afterwards, the source of the table as it has come down to us. The changes are two : (1) Instead of the three tribes East Wixna, West Wixna, and Herstina, the English text gives only the first two, while two Latin texts give the first and the first and third ; (2) Fserpinga is found in the second column. The former of these changes rnay be due to the growth of great monasteries in the Fen district Peterborough, Orowland, Ely " free from all secular service," so that 600 hides had to be erased, and the tribal name was erased with them. The second is no doubt owing to the transference of the Aro ssetna and following tribes from Wessex to Mercia ; a new administrative district was formed, with the Fserpinga added to give it an Anglian tone and perhaps an Anglian ealdorman. It would have been more exact to transfer the four tribes to the first (or Mercian) column, but practically it would be more convenient to transfer Fserpinga to the second column. By these changes the arith- metical perfection of the table was destroyed.

4. A difficulty. In the identifications of the various tribes given in the former paper a meaning for the names was several times found by changing a c in the middle of a word into t. One of the Latin copies 'written about JL250) sanctions the t, but in

t

y

/

and i is common enough in Jater manuscripts, yet the ordinary "specimens" of Anglo- baxon writing show a clear distinction between them. Hence the difficulty. Can any one skilled in palaeography point to any kind of writing used in the eighth century say) which would give such forms to these etters in the middle of words that a scribe of
 * he eleventh century would be liable to trans-

pose them, and write c for t ? J. B.

SITE OF BRUNANBURH. Sir James Ramsay, n the preface to his 'The Foundations of England, claims to have discovered the long- ost site of the battle of Brunanburh, which he gives reasons (vol. i. p. 285) for con- sidering to have been Bourne in Lincolnshire. Although many writers (including the author of the life of King Athelstan in the 'Die-