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.”

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was complete.  Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the island had passed into English hands.  Britain had in the main become England.  And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on the wreck of Rome.  So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been complete.  Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.  Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the English sword had drawn all was now purely English.

CHARLES KNIGHT

“They” [the Romans], says Bede, “resided within the rampart that Severus made across the island, on the south side of it; as the cities, temples, bridges, and paved ways do testify to this day.”  On the north of the wall were the nations that no severity had reduced to subjection, and no resistance could restrain from plunder.  At the extreme west of England were the people of Cornwall, or little Wales, as it was called; having the most intimate relations with the people of Britannia Secunda, or Wales; and both connected with the colony of Armorica.  The inhabitants of Cornwall and Wales, we may assume, were almost exclusively of the old British stock.  The abandonment of the country by the Romans had affected them far less than that change affected the more cultivated country, that had been the earliest subdued, and for nearly four centuries had received the Roman institutions and adopted the Roman customs.