Then came the great battles for possession of the land.  At Aylesford and Crayford the Kentish Britons were overthrown.  Before the Angles the Welsh fled like fire.  These events occupy a quarter of a century.  While they are going on, the Roman Emperor, as we have mentioned upon indubitable authority, receives an auxiliary force of twelve thousand men from Britain.  We cannot rely upon narratives that tell us of the king of the Britons, when we learn from no suspicious sources that the land was governed by many separate chiefs; and which represent a petty band of fugitives as gaining mighty triumphs for a great ruler, and then subduing him themselves in a wonderfully short time.

The pretensions of Hengist and Horsa to be the immediate descendants of Woden would seem to imply their mythical origin.  But many Saxon chiefs of undoubted reality rested their pretensions upon a similar genealogy.  The myth was as flattering to the Anglo-Saxon pride of descent as the corresponding myth that the ancient inhabitants of the island were descended from the Trojan Brute was acceptable to the British race.  But amid much of fable there is the undoubted fact that Germanic tribes were gradually possessing themselves of the fairest parts of Britain—­a progressive usurpation, far different from a sudden conquest.  Amid the wreck of the social institutions left by Rome, when all that remained of a governing power was centred in the towns, it may be readily conceived that the rich districts of the eastern and southern coasts would be eagerly peopled by new settlers, whose bond of society was founded upon the occupation of the land; and who, extending the area of their occupation, would eventually come into hostile conflict with the previous possessors.

For a century and a half a thick darkness seems to overspread the history of our country.  In the Anglo-Saxon writers we can trace little, with any distinctness, beyond the brief and monotonous records of victories and slaughters.  Hengist and AEsc slew four troops of Britons with the edge of the sword.  Hengist then vanishes, and AElla comes with his three sons.  In 491 they besieged Andres-cester, “and slew all that dwelt therein, so that not a single Briton was there left.”  Then come Cerdic and Cynric his son; then Port and his two sons, and land at Portsmouth; and so we reach the sixth century.  Cerdic and Cynric now stand foremost among the slaughterers, and they establish the kingdom of the West Saxons and conquer the Isle of Wight.

In the middle of the century Ida begins to reign, from whom arose the royal race of North-humbria.  In 565 Ethelbert succeeded to the kingdom of the Kentish-men, and held it fifty-three years.  The war goes on in the south-midland counties, where Cuthwulf is fighting; and it reaches the districts of the Severn, where Cuthwine and Ceawlin slay great kings, and take Gloucester and Cirencester and Bath.  One of these fierce brethren is killed at last, and Ceawlin, “having taken many spoils and towns innumerable, wrathful returned to his own.”  Where “his own” was we are not informed.