96 Transactions. 
that even its historic basis is doubtful. This only we really know, 
that more than a century intervened between the withdrawal of 
the Romans from their stations on the Wall and the successful 
invasion of Northumbria by the Angles. Muck 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 were 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 hardy Saxons, found an able and warlike Gulledig—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 find, they had rendered themselves masters of all 
the eastern half of the country, back to the water-shed, and in 
603 were able to fight and win this decisive battle of Daegsastan. 
