4.--Anyhow, the arrival of the successive swarms of Anglo-Saxons
from the mouth of the Elbe, and their hard-won conquest of Eastern
Britain during the 5th century, is certain. The western half of the
island, from Clydesdale southwards, resisted much longer, and, in
spite of its long and straggling frontier, held together for more
than a century. Not till the decisive victory of the Northumbrians at
Chester (A.D. 607), and that of the West Saxons at Beandune (A.D. 614)
was this Cymrian federation finally broken into three fragments, each
destined shortly to disintegrate into an ever-shifting medley of petty
principalities. Yet in each the ideal of national and racial unity
embodied in the word Cymry[372] long survived; and titles borne to
this day by our Royal House, "Duke of Cornwall," "Prince of Wales,"
"Duke of Albany," are the far-off echoes, lingering in each, of the
Roman "Comes Britanniae" and "Dux Britanniarum." The three feathers of
the Principality may in like manner be traced to the _tufa_, or plume,
borne before the supreme authority amongst the Romans of old, as the
like are borne before the Supreme Head of the Roman Church to this
day. And age after age the Cymric harpers sang of the days when
British armies had marched in triumph to Rome, and the Empire had
been won by British princes, till the exploits of their mystical
"Arthur"[373] became the nucleus of a whole cycle of mediaeval
romance, and even, for a while, a real force in practical
politics.[374]

D. 5.--And as the Britons never quite forgot their claims on the
Empire, so the Empire never quite forgot its claims on Britain. How
entirely the island was cut off from Rome we can best appreciate by
the references to it in Procopius. This learned author, writing under
Justinian, scarcely 150 years since the day when the land was fully
Roman, conceives of Britannia and Brittia as two widely distant
islands--the one off the coast of Spain, the other off the mouth
of the Rhine.[375] The latter is shared between the Angili,
Phrissones,[376] and Britons, and is divided _from North to
South_[377] by a mighty Wall, beyond which no mortal man can
breathe. Hither are ferried over from Gaul by night the souls of the
departed;[378] the fishermen, whom a mysterious voice summons to the
work, seeing no one, but perceiving their barks to be heavily sunk in
the water, yet accomplishing the voyage with supernatural celerity.

D. 6.--About the same date Belisarius off