With the battle of Chester Britain as a country ceased to exist.  By their victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint, of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall, from the general body of their race.  By AEthelfrith’s victory at Chester and the reduction of southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of Britain was broken into two several parts.  From this time therefore the character of the English conquest of Britain changes.  The warfare of Briton and Englishman died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms against separate British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians and Strathclyde, of Mercia against the Welsh between Anglesea and the British Channel, of Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip to the Land’s End.  But great as was the importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of England itself.  The drift towards national unity had already begun, but from the moment of AEthelfrith’s victory this drift became the main current of our history.  Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its conquerors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of plunder; while the severance of the British kingdoms took from their enemies the pressure of a common danger.  The conquests of AEthelfrith left him without a rival in military power, and he turned from victories over the Welsh, as their English foes called the Britons, to the building up of a lordship over his own countrymen.

[Sidenote:  Eadwine]

The power of AEthelberht seems to have declined with old age, and though the Essex men still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of Mid-Britain shook it off.  So strong however had the instinct of union now become, that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation.  Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and South-English now owned the lordship of the East-English King Raedwald.  The shelter given by Raedwald to AElla’s son Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian attack.  Fortune however deserted AEthelfrith, and a snatch of northern song still tells of the day when the river Idle by Retford saw his defeat and fall.  But the greatness of Northumbria survived its king.  In 617 Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men of Deira; and his conquest of Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which the Bernician conquest of Deira had first brought about.  The greatness of Northumbria now reached its height.  Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a genius for civil government which shows how utterly the mere age of conquest had passed away.  With him began the English proverb so often applied to after kings:  “A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine’s day.”  Peaceful communication revived along the deserted highways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set beside each for the traveller’s refreshment.  Some