[Sidenote: Britain becomes England]

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.

It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other
provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by
the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or
the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of
ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank,
but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all
but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to the
point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom
the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other
Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the
Roman civilization. Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank
mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have