south; no account of the conquest of the great Roman
town of York, or of the resistance offered by the powerful Brigantian
tribes. But a fragment of some old Northumbrian tradition, embedded in
the later and spurious Welsh compilation which bears the name of
Nennius, tells us a not improbable tale--that the first settlement on
the coast of the Lothians was made as early as the conquest of Kent, by
Jutes of the same stock as those who colonised Thanet. A hundred years
later, the Welsh poems seem to say, Ida "the flame-bearer," fought his
way down from a petty principality on the Forth, and occupied the whole
Northumbrian coast, in spite of the stubborn guerilla warfare of the
despairing provincials. Still less do we learn about the beginnings of
Mercia, the powerful English kingdom which occupied the midlands; or
about the first colonisation of East Anglia. In short, the legends of
the settlement, unhistorical and meagre as they are, refer only to the
Jutish and Saxon conquests in the south, and tell us nothing at all
about the origin of the main English kingdoms in the north. It is
important to bear in mind this fact, because the current conceptions as
to the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race and the extermination of the
native Welsh are largely based upon the very limited accounts of the
conquest of Kent and Sussex, and the mournful dirges of the Welsh monks
or bards.

It seems improbable, however, that the north-eastern coast of Britain,
naturally exposed above every other part to the ravages of northern
pirates, and in later days the head-quarters of the Danish intruders in
our island, should so long have remained free from English incursions.
If the Teutonic settlers really first established themselves here a
century later than their conquest of Kent, we can only account for it by
the supposition that York and the Brigantes, the old metropolis of the
provinces, held out far more stubbornly and successfully than Rochester
and Anderida, with their very servile Romanised population. But even the
words of the Chronicle do not necessarily imply that Ida was the first
king of the Northumbrians, or that the settlement of the country took
place in his days.[2] And if they did, we need not feel bound to accept
their testimony, considering that the earliest date we can assign for
the composition of the chronicle is the reign of AElfred: while Baeda, the
earlier native Northumbrian historian, throws no light at all upon the
quest