47 
Into the details of the English Conquest of Southern Britain 
I cannot now go. 
Of the Conquest of Mid-Britain and North Britain, very little 
is known, The Estuary of the Humber was the chief gate by 
which they found admission: some turned southwards, and 
founded the kingdom of Mercia, becoming known as marchmen 
between the English and Britons ; those who turned north founded 
the kingdom of Deira, and met further to the north another English 
kingdom, that of Bernicia, founded by Ida, who, in 547, had 
planted his kingdom on the rock of Bamborough. The great 
forest between ‘Tyne and Tees, was the March or Debateable 
Land between Deira and Bernicia, but these two kingdoms were 
united by Aithelfrith, and formed into the great English kingdom 
of Northumbria, which stretched from the Humber as far north as 
the Forth—you recollect that the east of the present kingdom of 
Scotland up to the Forth was, and is, English ground, though now 
incorporated into Scotland. Aithelfrith was a great conqueror. In 
603 he defeated the Scots at a place called Dzegsastan, which some 
think to be Dalston, near Carlisle; others Dawston in Liddlesdale. 
In 607 he completed the English Conquest of Britain by the 
capture of Chester, and, by so doing, he separated the Britons, of 
what is now Wales, from the Britons to the north of them. 
The English Conquest was marked by great atrocity: the 
wealthier Britons fled across the seas; the poorer took refuge in 
the mountains and the forests, until hunger drove them out to be 
cut down. So far as the English Conquest extended over 
Britain, it was a complete dispossession; the language of the 
Britons disappeared, as did their Christianity: the one was 
superseded by the English tongue, the latter by the religion of 
Woden and of Thor. 
The English Conquest covered the eastern part of Britain. 
At the end of the Sixth Century we can make out, among a number 
of obscure and small principalities, seven English kingdoms, of 
which some continuous history can be got. 
1. Kent, a Jutish kingdom. 2. Essex; 3. Sussex; 4. Wessex; 
all Saxon, as their names denote. 5. East Anglia; 6, North- 
