m, performed
a useful secular work. No traces now remain of old Selsea Cathedral,
its site having long been swallowed up by incursions of the sea. Baeda
has the ordinary number of miracles to record in connection with the
monastery.

As time went on, however, the isolation of Sussex became less complete.
AEthelwealh had got himself into complications with Wessex by accepting
the sovereignty of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras about
Southhampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror. Perhaps AEthelwealh
then repaired the old Roman roads which led from his own _ham_ at
Chichester to Portsmouth in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as to
connect his old and his new dominions with one another. At any rate,
shortly after, Caedwalla, the West Saxon, an aetheling at large on the
look-out for a kingdom, attacked him suddenly with his host of thegns
from this unexpected quarter, killed the King himself, and harried the
South Saxons from marsh to marsh. Two South Saxons thegns expelled him
for a time, and made themselves masters of the country. But afterwards,
Caedwalla, becoming King of the West Saxons, recovered Sussex once more,
and handed it on to his successor, Ini. Hence the South Saxons had no
bishopric of their own during this period, but were included in the see
of the West Saxons at Winchester.

During the hundred years of the Mercian Supremacy, coincident, roughly
speaking, with the eighth century, we hear little of Sussex; but it
seems to have shaken off the yoke of Wessex, and to have been in
subjection to the great Mercian over-lords alone. It had its own
under-kings and its own bishops. Early in the ninth century, however,
when Ecgberht the West Saxon succeeding in throwing off the Mercian
yoke, the other Saxon States of South Britain willingly joined him
against the Anglian oppressors. 'The men of Kent and Surrey, Sussex and
Essex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht.' When the royal house of the
South Saxons died out, Sussex still retained a sort of separate
existence within the West Saxon State, as Wales does in the England of
our own day. AEthelwulf made his son under-king of Kent, Essex, Surrey,
and Sussex; and so, during the troublous times of the Danish invasion,
when all southern England became one in its resistance to the heathen,
those old principalities gradually sank into the position of provinces
or shires.

From the period of union with the general West Saxon Kingdom (which
grew slowly into the