hames a line of demarcation, only passable
at a few points, from its estuary nearly to the Severn Sea, but the
southern regions cut off by it were parted by Nature into five main
districts. Sussex was hemmed in by the great forest of Anderida, and
that of Selwood continued the line from Southampton to Bristol.
Kent was isolated by the Romney marshes and the wild country about
Tunbridge, while the western peninsula was a peninsula indeed when
the sea ran up to beyond Glastonbury. In this region, then, the later
Wessex, we find five main tribes; the men of Kent, the Regni south of
the Weald, the Atrebates along the Thames, the Belgae on the Wiltshire
Avon, and the Damnonii of Devon and Cornwall, with (perhaps) a
sub-tribe of their Name, the Durotriges, in Dorsetshire.

G. 5.--Like the south, the eastern, western, and northern districts of
England were cut off from the centre by natural barriers. The Fens of
Cambridgeshire and the marshes of the Lea valley, together with the
dense forest along the "East Anglian" range, enclosed the east in
a ring fence; within which yet another belt of woodland divided the
Trinobantes of Essex from the Iceni of Norfolk and Suffolk. The Severn
and the Dee isolated what is now Wales, a region falling naturally
into two sub-divisions; South Wales being held by the Silurians and
their Demetian subjects, North Wales by the Ordovices. The lands
north of the Humber, again, were barred off from the south by barriers
stretching from sea to sea; the Humber itself on the one hand, the
Mersey estuary on the other, thrusting up marshes to the very foot of
the wild Pennine moorlands between. And the whole of this vast region
seems to have been under the Brigantes, who held the great plain of
York, and exercised more or less of a hegemony over the Parisians
of the East Riding, the Segontii of Lancashire, and the Otadini,
Damnonii, and Selgovae between the Tyne and the Forth. Finally,
the Midlands, parcelled up by the forests of Sherwood, Needwood,
Charnwood, and Arden, into quarters, found space for the Dobuni in the
Severn valley (to the west of the Cateuchlani), for the Coritani east
of the Trent, and for their westward neighbours the Cornavii.[48]

G. 6.--All these tribes are given in Ptolemy's geography, but only a
few, such as the Iceni, the Silurians, and the Brigantes, meet us
in actual history; whilst, of them all, the Damnonian name alone
reappears after the fall of the Roman dominion. Thus the