27 



misunderstood, may be gathered from certain events re- 

 corded in the History of Nennius, B?eda's Life of St. Cuth- 

 bert, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is possible to fix 

 the date and the circumstances of the conquest of Southern 

 Lancashire with considerable accuracy, and to make out the 

 latest possible time at which any part of the county was 

 under Welsh, and not English rule, or in other words, was 

 within the boundary of Wales and not of England. To exa- 

 mine these points property we must see what relation 

 existed between the English on the one hand and the Brit- 

 Welsh on the other. 



In the year 449, the three ships which contained Hengist 

 and his warriors landed at Ebbsfleet in Thanet, and the first 

 English colony Avas founded among the descendants of the 

 Roman provincials, who were known to the strangers as 

 Brit- Welsh. From that time a steady immigration of 

 Angle, Jute, and Frisian set in towards our eastern coast, 

 as far north as the Firth of Forth, until in the first 

 half of the 6th century the whole of the eastern part 

 of our island was occupied by various tribes, whose 

 names for the most part still survive in the names of 

 our counties. The princi^^al rivers also offered them a free 

 passage into the heart of the country, and the kingdom of 

 Mercia gradually expanded from the banks of the Trent 

 until it reached as far as the line of the Severn. The river 

 Humber afforded a base of operations for the Anglian free- 

 booters who founded the kingdom of Deira, or modern 

 Yorkshire, while the rock of Bamborough was the centre 

 from which Ida, who landed with 50 ships in the year 547 

 conquered Bernicia, or the region extending from the river 

 Tees to Edinburgh. The tide of English colonization rolled 

 steadily westward until at the close of the 6th century the 

 Pennine chain, or the stretch of hills, heath, and forest ex- 

 tending southwards from Cumberland and Westmoreland, 

 through Yorkshire and Derbyshu^e, as far as the line of the 



