21. They were mostly about the wars, and the brave British chiefs who defended the country against the Saxons; and if you should ever hear anybody speak of king Arthur, and the knights of the Round Table, you may remember that he is said to have been one of those chiefs; and, if we may believe the tale, killed four hundred Saxons with his own hand in one battle.
22. Those who made the story about him, say that the nobles of his court were all so equal in bravery and goodness, that he had a large round table made for them to feast at, that no one might sit above another; so they were called knights of the Round Table. But let us return to our history.
23. The Saxons went on making one conquest after another, till, at last, they were in possession of the whole country; where very few of the natives were left, for most of those who had not been killed in the wars, had fled into Gaul, or taken refuge among the Welsh mountains; so from this time we shall hear no more of the Britons, but must look upon the Saxons as the people of England.
24. I told you how Esca had established the little kingdom of Kent. Well, in the course of the wars, six more kingdoms had been formed in the same manner, by different Saxon chiefs, so that, by the time the conquest was completed, there were seven kingdoms in Britain, namely, Kent, Sussex, Essex, and East Anglia, Northumbria, Wessex, and Mercia; and this division of the country among seven kings, was called the Saxon Heptarchy.
25. The Saxons were not clever people, like the Romans, but were rough and ignorant, and cared for nothing but fighting; so while the wars were going on, they ruined and destroyed all the beautiful and useful works that had been done in the Roman times; for they did not understand their value, and only thought it was a fine thing to destroy all that belonged to their enemies.
26. But the works of the Romans were very strong; for even now, when workmen are digging in London, and different parts of the country, they sometimes find Roman walls, and pavements, and foundations of houses, that show what good architects the Romans were.
27. When the Saxons had got possession of the whole country, you may perhaps suppose they would be quiet and contented, but this was not the case; for as long as there were separate kingdoms, they were continually at war with each other, and the principal cause of disagreement was, that, among the kings, there was always one called the Bretwalda, or ruler of Britain, who had some degree of authority over the rest; but as any one of them might be raised to this dignity, it was a constant source of quarrels and warfare, until, at length, the weaker kingdoms were overcome by the more powerful ones, and there was but one king over the whole country, which then took the name of Angleland or England, from a particular tribe of people called the Angles, who came here in great numbers with the Saxons.
28. I dare say you did not know before how Britain came to be called England; and you would be very much amused to hear how many of the places in it, came by their present names.
29. We will take for example Norfolk and Suffolk, which, with Cambridge, formed the kingdom of East Anglia, and was conquered by the Angles. Now these Angles consisted of two tribes, who divided their conquest between them, one tribe settling in the north part, the other in the south; so that they were called North folk, and South folk, and thus came the names of the two counties.
QUESTIONS.