9'tf Transactions. 



that even its historic basis is doubtful. This only we really know, 

 that more than a centuiy intervened between the withdrawal of 

 the Romans from their stations on the Wall and the successful 

 invasion of Noi'thunibria by the Angles. Much may have 

 happened within that century, but for us it is blank and voice- 

 less. If the twelve Arthurian battles of Gildas were ever fought, 

 and if Mr Skene be right in saying that they must have been 

 fought in the north, then they took place within that century; and 

 they wei-e not fought with the Angles, who came into England 

 after Ida and his successors. But they may have been fought 

 with the Picts, and with that earlier Saxon colony which, as I have 

 already said, almost certainly existed in the Merse and on the 

 Lothian seaboard even before the withdrawal of the Romans. 

 That colony appears to have been closely connected with the 

 tribes that under Hengist entered Kent ; and the colonists were, 

 therefore, Saxons and not Angles. Let us suppose, if we please, 

 that after the withdrawal of the Romans these early northmen 

 swarmed southward and westward in alliance or in rivalry with 

 the northern Picts, and overpowered the Britons who had been 

 left by the Roman commanders to man, as they best could, the 

 stations on the Wall ; that they oppressed and harried, but 

 were not strong or numerous enough to dispossess or exterminate, 

 the Britons as far south as York and the Humber. Let us then 

 suppose that the Britons, driven by necessity to close their ranks 

 and sink their sectional disputes that made them an easy prey to 

 the haidy Saxons, found an able and warlike GuUedig — or 

 "Wall-keeper," the Arthur of Gildas, and that in a series of 

 triumphant battles he defeated the Saxons, and drove them back 

 over the Cheviots, and over the Tweed, and then we should have 

 the basis of fact for the entire Arthurian legend. The era of 

 union and conquest would not last long, and when the Angles 

 arrived in the middle of the sixth century they met with no 

 effective or protracted resistance ; for in the course of half a 

 century, as we tind, they had rendered themselves masters of all 

 the eastern half of the country, back to tlie water-shed, and in 

 603 were able to fight and win this decisive battle of Daegsastan. 



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