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Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain by Grant Allen
page 29 of 206 (14%)
[1] Cerdic is apparently a British rather than an English
name, since Bæda 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
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