full mastery over the Britons along their western border.  But once masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, whose first King AElla was now sinking to the grave.  The struggle filled the foreign markets with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay recalled the glories of the Imperial City.  Their white bodies, their fair faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who passed by.  “From what country do these slaves come?” Gregory asked the trader who brought them.  The slave-dealer answered “They are English,” or as the word ran in the Latin form it would bear at Rome, “they are Angles.”  The deacon’s pity veiled itself in poetic humour.  “Not Angles but Angels,” he said, “with faces so angel-like!  From what country come they?” “They come,” said the merchant, “from Deira.” “De ira!” was the untranslatable wordplay of the vivacious Roman—­“aye, plucked from God’s ire and called to Christ’s mercy!  And what is the name of their king?” They told him “AElla,” and Gregory seized on the word as of good omen.  “Alleluia shall be sung in AElla’s land,” he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought to sing it.

While Gregory was thus playing with AElla’s name the old king passed away, and with his death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems to have ceased.  His children fled over the western border to find refuge among the Welsh, and AEthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph.  A new age of our history opens in this submission of one English people to another.  When the two kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of national formation began.  If a new England sprang out of the mass of English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common political head.  The difference in power between state and state which inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which the conquest of Britain was now assuming.  Up to this time all the kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main on a footing of equality.  All had taken an independent share in the work of conquest.  Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.  Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.  It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London.  In neither instance do we find