If, then, we leave out of consideration the etymological myths and
numerical absurdities of the English or Welsh legends, and look only at
the facts disclosed to us by the subsequent condition of the country, we
shall find that the early Anglo-Saxon settlements took place somewhat
after this wise. In the extreme north, the English apparently did not
care to settle in the rugged mountain country between Aberdeen and
Edinburgh, inhabited by the free and warlike Picts. But from the Firth
of Forth to the borders of Essex, a succession of colonies, belonging to
the restricted English tribe, occupied the whole provincial coast,
burning, plundering, and massacring in many places as they went. First
and northernmost of all came the people whom we know by their Latinised
title of Bernicians, and who descended upon the rocky braes between
Forth and Tyne. These are the English of Ida's kingdom, the modern
Lothians and Northumberland. Their chief town was at Bebbanburh, now
Bamborough, which Ida "timbered, and betyned it with a hedge." Next in
geographical order stood the people of Deira, or Yorkshire, who occupied
the rich agricultural valley of the Ouse, the fertile alluvial tract of
Holderness, and the bleak coast-line from Tyne to Humber. Whether they
conquered the Roman capital of York, or whether it made terms with the
invaders, we do not know; but it is not mentioned as the chief town of
the English kings before the days of Eadwine, under whom the two
Northumbrian chieftainships were united into a single kingdom. However,
as Eadwine assumed some of the imperial Roman trappings, it seems not
unlikely that a portion at least of the Romanised population survived
the conquest. The two principalities probably spread back politically in
most places as far as the watershed which separates the basins of the
German Ocean and the Irish Sea; but the English population seems to have
lived mainly along the coast or in the fertile valley of the Ouse and
its tributaries; for Elmet and Loidis, two Welsh principalities, long
held out in the Leeds district, and the people of the dales and the