44 THE RUTHWELL CROSS. 
which I think is also more graceful; and the style of the 
missing arms may have been more like those shewn in Fig. 
19; at any rate, the archer was probably shooting at a bird 
(or beast) in the panel at which he aims. 
- Under the St. John I think we can read ‘* ADORAMUS 
IN(itium) ET F(ine)M,’’ recalling the formula of the lately re- 
discovered stone at Kirkmadrine and others. The sketch of 
the loose fragment (to twice the scale of the cross) is added, 
because it looks like an ornamented door-jamb of the late 
Anglian period, and tempts the suggestion that there was a 
stone church here, perhaps rather later than the cross. The 
place was not called ‘‘ Ruthwell ’’ in those days; it is a Viking 
Age name; and this makes the search for records of any forn- 
dation by no means easy. 
But Ruthwell was not chen in the Scotland of that age; 
it was in the land of the Cumbri, which had been annexed by 
the Northumbrian Angles. In 750, King Eadberht, whose 
coin has been mentioned, took Kyle from the Strathclyde 
Britons (Bedae continuatio), and on August ist, 756, he and 
Aengus, King of Picts, in alliance entered Dumbarton 
(Symeon Durh., Hist. Reg., 756). Though the conquering 
army met with some disaster ten days later, the Northum- 
brians did not relax their hold on the south-west of what is 
now Scotland; there is no trace of any return of the Cumbri to 
power (Skene, Celt. Scot., i., 296), nor of any great move of 
Celts against Angles, until Kenneth MacAlpin, a century 
later, invaded ‘‘ Saxonia’’—the Lowlands—and _ burnt 
Dunbar and Melrose. Even later (Sym. Durh., Hist. Recap., 
854) Lindisfarne diocese included Melrose, Edinburgh, and 
Abercorn; and in the west, the last Anglian bishop of Whit- 
horn held his post until 802, the year in which Iona was first 
burnt by Vikings, and no doubt the whole coast threatened. 
In view of this 8th century settlement of Angles through- 
out the Lowlands, we should expect many traces of their 
presence beside the Ruthwell Cross. | These traces exist. 
They have been illustrated in Stuart’s Sculptured Stones and 
Romilly Allen’s Early Christian Monuments, but I do not 
know that they have been clearly disentangled from the rude 
stones of earlier age and the Celtic and Scandinavian monu- 
