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 farther southward, and under the name
of "South Engle" occupied the ooelitic 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 pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to
make a fresh and desperate stand.

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused
the West Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested
inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the
hill fort of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs,
and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames made them masters in 571 of
the districts which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

Pushing along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill
they swooped at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along
the Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued
under their British kings to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil
of an English victory at Deorham, and the line of the great western
river lay open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West Saxons
penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the
Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in
flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously
the death song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of
white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had
left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through
halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan,
"without fire, without light, without song," their stillness broken only
by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh drink,
heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."