exceedingly small, but important, as comprising in its limits the city of London.
Attracted by the success of the adventurers who had gone before them, a great portion of the Angles, under the conduct of their warlike chief, Ida, and his twelve sons, decided on migrating to Britain. Landing between the Forth and the Tweed, and gradually advancing, they subjugated the entire country between the Humber and the Clyde, finding the Britons everywhere too much divided or enfeebled to oppose them.
Egbert.
The possessions which Ida acquired became the Saxon kingdom of Bernice; whilst Ælla, achieving the conquest of the states of Defyr, between the Tweed and the Humber, founded the seventh Saxon kingdom, which bore the name of Deira, and twenty-six years afterwards established an eighth kingdom between the Trent and Wales, called Mercia.
There were successively established eight kingdoms of the Saxon race, forming an octarchy, though more generally known by the designation of the Heptarchy, in consequence of the union of the two states of Bernice and Deira, which reduced the number to seven.
A conquering people seldom exterminate the inhabitants of the country they succeed in subjugating, especially if they fix themselves in their new possessions. The Britons, although reduced to a state of servitude, deprived of their chiefs, and compelled to acquire the language of their masters, still continued to exist, retaining at the same time many of their ancient customs, which had considerable affinity with those of the Saxons, especially in the laws which regulated the possession of land, the government of families, and the administration of justice. Still their situation must have been insupportable, and thousands fled to Wales, which owed its independence quite as much to its natural advantages as to the indisputable valour of its inhabitants, who were so passionately addicted to war that when they had no foreign enemies to oppose, they quarreled and destroyed each other. Thus was prepared the ruin of their independence, which they were destined, however, to preserve for a considerably longer period.
Many of the fugitive Britons landed in Gaul, where they were well received, and permitted to found a state; they gradually extended the name of Bretagne to the all but island of Armorica.
About the same period, a tribe of Saxons, who had been expelled from Germany, landed at a short distance from them, and built the city of Bayeux.
The religion of the Saxons, like that of most of the people of Germany, was a gross idolatry, founded on the worship of the powers of Nature. Fire and water were personified in their goddess Hertha. Rheda was another of their divinities; and to their great idol, Irminsal, they sacrificed human victims. Christianity suffered fearfully on the island from the ferocious superstition of the conquerors.
