resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the predecessor of our
Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make
a fresh and desperate stand.

[Sidenote: Conquests of West-Saxons]

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the
West-Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive