Winchester they fixed their capital for awhile. The long chain of chalk
downs behind the city formed their weak northern mark or boundary,
while to the west they seem always to have carried on a desultory
warfare with the yet unsubdued Welsh, commanded by their great leader
Ambrosius, who has left his name to Ambres-byrig, or Amesbury.

We must not, however, suppose that each of these colonies had from the
first a united existence as a political community. We know that even the
eight or ten kingdoms into which England was divided at the dawn of the
historical period were each themselves produced by the consolidation of
several still smaller chieftainships. Even in the two petty Kentish
kingdoms there were under-kings, who had once been independent. Wight
was a distinct kingdom till the reign of Ceadwalla in Wessex. The later
province of Mercia was composed of minor divisions, known as the
Hwiccas, the Middle English, the West Hecan, and so forth. Henry of
Huntingdon, a historian of the twelfth century, who had access, however,
to several valuable and original sources of information now lost, tells
us that many chieftains came from Germany, occupied Mercia and East
Anglia, and often fought with one another for the supremacy. In fact,
the petty kingdoms of the eighth century were themselves the result of a
consolidation of many forgotten principalities founded by the first
conquerors.

Thus the earliest England with which we are historically acquainted
consisted of a mere long strip or borderland of Teutonic coast, divided
into tiny chieftainships, and girding round half of the eastern and
southern shores of a still Celtic Britain. Its area was discontinuous,
and its inland boundaries towards the back country were vaguely defined.
As Massachusetts and Connecticut stood off from Virginia and Georgia–as
New South Wales and Victoria stand off from South Australia and