and the Irish Sea; but the English population seems to have
lived mainly along the coast or in the fertile valley of the Ouse and
its tributaries; for Elmet and Loidis, two Welsh principalities, long
held out in the Leeds district, and the people of the dales and the
inland parts, as we shall see reason hereafter to conclude, even now
show evident marks of Celtic descent. Together the two chieftainships
were generally known by the name of Northumberland, now confined to
their central portion; but it must never be forgotten that the Lothians,
which at present form part of modern Scotland, were originally a portion
of this early English kingdom, and are still, perhaps, more purely
English in blood and speech than any other district in our island.

From Humber to the Wash was occupied by a second English colony, the men
of Lincolnshire, divided into three minor tribes, one of which, the
Gainas, has left its name to Gainsborough. Here, again, we hear nothing
of the conquest, nor of the means by which the powerful Roman colony of
Lincoln fell into the hands of the English. But the town still retains
its Roman name, and in part its Roman walls; so that we may conclude the
native population was not entirely exterminated.

East Anglia, as its name imports, was likewise colonised by an English
horde, divided, like the men of Kent, into two minor bodies, the North
Folk and the South Folk, whose names survive in the modern counties of
Norfolk and Suffolk. But in East Anglia, as in Yorkshire, we shall see
reason hereafter to conclude that the lower orders of Welsh were largely
spared, and that their descendants still form in part the labouring
classes of the two counties. Here, too, the English settlers probably
clustered thickest along the coast, like the Danes in later days; and
the great swampy expanse of the Fens, then a mere waste of marshland
tenanted by beavers and wild fowl, formed the inland boundary or mark of
their almost insular kingdom.

The southern half of the coast was peopled by Englishmen of the Saxon
and Jutish tribes. First came the country of the East Saxons, or Essex,
the flat land stretching from the borders of East Anglia to the estuary
of the Thames. This had been one of the most thickly-populated Roman
regions, containing the important stations of Camalodunum, London, and
Verulam. But we know nothing, even by report, of its conquest. Beyond
it, and separated by the fenland of the Lea, lay the outlying li