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with his Overlord, Eadmund the Magnificent, king of the English, 
who at once fell upon Cumbria, laid the whole of it waste, and 
and handed it over to Malcolm, king of Scotland, on condition 
that he should be his ally by land and sea. Tradition says that 
the decisive battle between the English and the Britons of Cumbria 
took place at Dunmail Raise, and that King Dunmail fell there. 
The poet says :— 
They buried on the mountain side 
King Dunmail, where he fought and died ; 
But mount, and mere, and moor again 
Shall see King Dunmail come again. 
Mantled and mailed, repose his bones, 
Twelve cubits deep beneath the stones ; 
But many a fathom deeper down 
In Grisedale’s tarn, lies Dunmail’s crown. 
. 
But Dunmail, mantled, crowned, and mailed, 
Again shall Cumbria’s King be hailed : 
And o’er his hills and valleys reign, 
When Eildon’s heights are field and plain.* 
Alas for the poet and for the legend! King Dunmail escaped, and 
died peaceably at Rome thirty years afterwards. 
To briefly review these events, which are of great political 
importance in our history. King Dunmail was, by virtue of the 
Commendation of 925, vassal to King Eadmund. He revolted 
against his Overlord, who took his kingdom from him, and granted 
it in 945 to Malcolm I., king of Scotland, as a feudal benefice in 
the strictest sense. Cumbria thus became a /ief of the Crown of 
England, but not a fief held within the kingdom of England: it was 
without that kingdom, and had always been so. 
From this time Cumbria continued in the possession of the 
royal line of Scotland, held as a fief under the English king, either 
by the king of Scotland himself, or by a near relation—usually by 
his proximate heir. 
Nothing is recorded of it for many years, except that in the 
* Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country. By J. Pagen White. p. 255. 
