in form it would bear at Rome, "they are Angles." The deacon's pity
veiled itself in poetic humour. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with
faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the
merchant, "from Deira." "_De ira!_" was the untranslatable wordplay of
the vivacious Roman--"aye, plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's
mercy! And what is the name of their king?" They told him "AElla," and
Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in
AElla's land," he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should
be brought to sing it.

While Gregory was thus playing with AElla's name the old king passed away,
and with his death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems to have
ceased. His children fled over the western border to find refuge among
the Welsh, and AEthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph. A new age
of our history opens in this submission of one English people to another.
When the two kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of
national formation began. If a new England sprang out of the mass of
English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the
gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common
political head. The difference in power between state and state which
inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which
the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the
kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main
on a footing of equality. All had taken an independent share in the work
of conquest. Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was
recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.
Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon
kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of
each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.
It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were
grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South
and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In neither
instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of
one member of the group over the others; while north of the Humber the
feeling between the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility rather than of
friendship.