ling over the
great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was
done.

The warriors of Hengist had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of
Sussex between its southern edge and the sea.

This coast was guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall
of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South
Saxons. "AElle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of
the conquerors, "and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterward
one Briton left."

But Hengist and AElle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed in 495 to the
great downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere
was the strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a
decisive victory at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set
the crown of the West Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest belt
around it checked any further advance; and only a year after Charford
the Britons rallied under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the
invaders as they pressed westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a
great overthrow at Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a
long pause in the Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the
Gewissas rested, a series of victories whose history is lost was giving
to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of
the Thames.

It is probable, however, that the strength of Camulodunum, the
predecessor of our modern Colchester, made the progress of these
assailants a slow and d