London to St. David's Head, from
the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
unconquered: and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by the
third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which was
to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on the people which
sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that they won. The
Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of Northumbria
and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by
the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia. But it was not till the
moment we have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto held
the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the Humber and the
Trent. This great river-line led like a highway into the heart of
Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of British
resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratae, the predecessor of our
Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
to have push