pped
on their way to the west by the great fen, but either a branch of the
Lindiswara or some new-comers made their way up the Trent, and
established themselves first at Nottingham and then at Leicester, and
called themselves the Middle English. Another body, known as the
Mercians, or men of the mark or border-land, seized on the upper
valley of the Trent. North of the Humber the advance was still slower.
In =547=, five years before the West Saxons attacked Sorbiodunum, Ida,
a chieftain of one of the scattered settlements on the coast, was
accepted as king by all those which lay between the Tees and the
Forth. His new kingdom was called Bernicia, and his principal fortress
was on a rock by the sea at Bamborough. During the next fifty years he
and his successors enlarged their borders till they reached that
central ridge of moorland hill which is sometimes known as the Pennine
range. The Angles between the Tees and the Humber called their country
Deira, but though they also united under a king, their progress was as
slow as that of the Bernicians. Bernicia and Deira together were known
as North-humberland, the land north of the Humber, a much larger
territory than that of the modern county of Northumberland.

22. =The Kymry.=--It is probable that the cause of the slow advance of
the northern Angles lay in the existence of a strong Celtic state in
front. Welsh tradition speaks of a ruler named Cunedda, who after the
departure of the Roman legions governed the territory from the Clyde
to the south of Wales, which formed the greater part of what had once
been known as Upper Britain. (See p. 25.) This territory was inhabited
by a mixed population of Britons and Goidels, with an isolated body of
Picts in Galloway. A common danger from the English fused them
together, and as a sign of the wearing out of old distinctions, they
took the name of Kymry, or Comrades, the name by which the Welsh are
known amongst one another to this day, and which is also preserved in
the name of Cumberland, though the Celtic language is no longer spoken
there.

23. =Britain at the End of the Sixth Century.=--During the sixth
century the Kymry ceased to be governed by one ruler, but the
chieftains of the various territories all acknowledged the supremacy
of a descendant of Cunedda. For purposes of war they combined
together, and as the country which they occupied was hilly and easily
defended, the northern English discovered that they too must uni