years later, one Port landed at Portsmouth with two ships, and there slew a Welsh nobleman.  But we know positively that the name of Portsmouth comes from the Latin Portus; and therefore Port must have been simply invented to explain the unknown derivation.  Still more flagrant is the case of Wihtgar, who conquered the Isle of Wight, and was buried at Wihtgarasbyrig, or Carisbrooke.  For the origin of that name is really quite different:  the Wiht-ware or Wiht-gare are the men of Wight, just as the Cant-ware are the men of Kent:  and Wiht-gara-byrig is the Wight-men’s-bury, just as Cant-wara-byrig or Canterbury is the Kent-men’s-bury.  Moreover, a double story is told in the Chronicle as to the original colonisation of Wessex; the first attributing the conquest to Cerdic and Cynric, and the second to Stuf and Wihtgar.

 [1] Cerdic is apparently a British rather than an English
     name, since Baeda mentions a certain “Cerdic, rex Brettonum.” 
     This may have been a Caradoc.  Perhaps the first element in
     the names Cerdices ora, Cerdices ford, &c., was older than
     the English conquest.  The legends are invariably connected
     with local names.

The only other existing legend refers to the great English kingdom of Northumbria:  and about it the English Chronicle, which is mainly West Saxon in origin, merely tells us in dry terms under the year 547, “Here Ida came to rule.”  There are no details, even of the meagre kind, vouchsafed in the south; no account of the conquest of the great Roman town of York, or of the resistance offered by the powerful Brigantian tribes.  But a fragment of some old Northumbrian tradition, embedded in the later and spurious Welsh compilation which bears the name of Nennius, tells us a not improbable tale—­that the first settlement on the coast of the Lothians was made as early as the conquest of Kent, by Jutes of the same stock as those who colonised Thanet.  A hundred years later, the Welsh poems seem to say, Ida “the flame-bearer,” fought his way down from a petty principality on the Forth, and occupied the whole Northumbrian coast, in spite of the stubborn guerilla warfare of the despairing provincials.  Still less do we learn about the beginnings of Mercia, the powerful English kingdom which occupied the midlands; or about the first colonisation of East Anglia.  In short, the legends of the settlement, unhistorical and meagre as they are, refer only to the Jutish and Saxon conquests in the south, and tell us nothing at all about the origin of the main English kingdoms in the north.  It is important to bear in mind this fact, because the current conceptions as to the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race and the extermination of the native Welsh are largely based upon the very limited accounts of the conquest of Kent and Sussex, and the mournful dirges of the Welsh monks or bards.