BRITAIN ABOUT 613.
Showing the effects of the victorious campaigns of Ceawlin and Aethelfrith. The line of the Anglo-British frontier was extremely vague, and the indications are therefore only approximate.
Before Deva there gathered for battle Cadwan, King of Gwynedd, the most powerful of the Kymric princes; Brochmail, King of Theyrnllwg; and Selim, perhaps Prince of Powys. Near Deva lay the great monastery of Bangor Iscoed, with its 2,100 monks; and, after spending three days in prayer and fasting, 1,200 of the latter accompanied the Britons to the field. They stood apart, and a detachment of warriors under Brochmail guarded them. Aethelfrith watched the gestures and movements of the strange company, and the sound of their chants and prayers floated across to him. ‘They bear not arms,’ he said to his chiefs, ‘but our enemies they be, for their imprecations assail us. Slay them first.’ The grim order was obeyed. Brochmail and his followers were put to flight; the monks were butchered ruthlessly, and then, having disposed of supernatural enmity, the English turned to fight their secular adversaries. The battle was long and desperately contested, and Bede says that Aethelfrith’s army suffered severely; but it ended in another great English victory. Two British kings were slain; Cadwan and Brochmail fled with only a remnant of their army.
Aethelfrith did not live to complete the conquest of the north; he died in civil strife four years later. But the battles of Deorham and Deva ensured the complete conquest of Britain. The British states were hopelessly parted from one another, and could never again combine for resistance, even had they the will to do so. They were, in 620, as their foes had been in 520, cut into disconnected masses. Worse still, they occupied wild and barren territories, and the dynastic conditions did not make for internal peace. Nor did they ever again produce a really great leader. After Deorham and Deva there was never any real hope of recovering the lost ground, and to Ceawlin and Aethelfrith this result was almost entirely due.
Inadequate and nebulous as this narrative of the events of a period of such vital importance to the English nation may appear, yet out of it there stand forth certain clearly-defined epochs and figures. The invaders at first only plundered, until an apparently chance incident opened the way to permanent settlement. For a time the tide of conquest and occupation was checked by the series of brilliant victories gained by Ambrosius and Arthur, but the civil broils of the Britons prevented any permanent success over the continually multiplying enemy; and with the advent of two really great leaders on the side of the invaders, the older inhabitants found themselves hopelessly penned up in the barren regions of the west. Thenceforth Britain was Britain no longer, but Angle-land—England.
CHAPTER V
THE VIKING RAVAGES
From 596, the year of the coming of St. Augustine, to 793, England was practically untroubled by foreign invasion, except in so far as the raids of the still independent Kymry come under that heading. The period was by no means peaceful; the three great kingdoms—Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex—were frequently at strife, and once or twice the Welsh interfered with effect in their wars. Wessex was nearly always torn with intestine war. After 758 the condition of Northumbria was one of chronic anarchy.