The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames and
leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future
landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of
Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "Ælle and
Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and
slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left."
But Hengest and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed to the great
downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the
strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory
at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set the crown of the
West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt around it checked
any further advance; and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders as they pressed
westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a long pause in the
Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested a