Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/20

6. In its original extent the Northan-hymbra-land—Latinized Northumbria—included the whole country occupied by the Angles north of the Humber, that is, the territory from the Humber to the Forth. The oldest division of this territory was at the river Tees, by which it was parted into the two provinces of Bernicia and Deira—the Bryneich and Deifr of the ancient British bards—which were now under the rule of a single monarch, now independent of each other; the seat of the Bernician ruler being at Bamborough, that of the sovereign of Deira at York. After the final separation of the two provinces, the name of Northumbria was retained by the northern province between the Tees and the Forth, until the cession of the district north of the Tweed to the King of the Scots, and the placing of the district between the Tees and Tyne under the jurisdiction of Durham, left the territory between the Tyne and Tweed, or the present shire of Northumberland, as the mutilated representative of the ancient Northan-hymbra-land. Cymraland, Cumbra-land, or Cumbria, the territory of the northern Cymry, the Gwynedd-a-Gogledd, or "Wales of the North" of Aneurin, stretched from the Firth of Clyde to Morecambe Bay; but after Strathclyde and the territories adjacent had been annexed to Scotland, the name of Cumberland became restricted to the fragment south of the Solway. It is necessary to distinguish carefully these varying applications of the names of Northumberland and Cumberland; and especially not to confound the ancient territories with the modern English counties, which are the mere stumps of the original provinces, after the kings of England and Scotland had successively cut off and appropriated their northern and southern extremities, and England, as the stronger power, finally absorbed the remainder.

§ 4. The date at which the Teutonic invaders first appeared in the north has not been accurately determined. There seems good reason for believing that, before the abandonment of the country by the Romans, they aided the Picts and Scots beyond the Northern Wall in their attacks upon the Eomanized provinces, and shortly after that event they appear as permanent settlers. According to Nennius, shortly after the landing of the Saxons in Kent, Octa and Ebissa, the son and nephew of Hengist, crossed the North Sea with forty ciules, and having devastated the Orkneys, and sailed round the land of the Picts, they came and seized several districts below the Forth (Mare Fresicum, which he describes as forming—in his day—the boundary between the Saxons and Scots) as far as the confines of the Picts. According to the tradition preserved by Fordun, they came at the invitation of Drust or Drostan, the Pictish king, a statement which tallies with Bede's account of a league between the Saxons and Picts. William of Malmesbury, who wrote at a much later period, in the midst of the feudal notions of his age, states, that