[Sidenote:  Conquests of West-Saxons]

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the West-Saxons to a new advance.  For thirty years they had rested inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in 571 made them masters of the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.  Pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn.  Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of the conquerors.  Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in flames.  The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, “the white town in the valley,” the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodlands.  The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan, “without fire, without light, without song,” their stillness broken only by the eagle’s scream, the eagle who “has swallowed fresh drink, heart’s blood of Kyndylan the fair.”

Chapter II
the English kingdoms
577-796

[Sidenote:  Britain becomes England]

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was complete.  Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands.  Britain had in the main become England.  And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on the wreck of Rome.  So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been complete.  Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.  Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the English sword had drawn all was now purely English.

It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other provinces of Rome.  The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of ages to absorb their conquerors.  French is the tongue, not of the Frank, but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all but unknown in Lombardy.