passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford.

A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove the British forces in
terror upon London; but the ground was soon won back again, and it was
not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had gone on along
the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet.
Here however the overthrow was so terrible that from this moment all
hope of saving northern Kent seems to have been abandoned, and it was
only on its southern shore that the Britons held their ground. Ten years
later, in 475, the long contest was over, and with the fall of Lymne,
whose broken walls look from the slope to which they cling over the
great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first English conqueror was
done.

The warriors of Hengist had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of
Sussex between its southern edge and the sea.

This coast was guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall
of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South
Saxons. "Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of