penetrated to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the
Wrekin which has been recently brought again to light, went up in
flames. The raid ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
strength, but a British poet in verses still left to us sings piteously
the death song of Uriconium, "the white town in the valley," the town of
white stone gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had
left it a heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered through
halls he had known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan,
"without fire, without light, without song," their stillness broken only
by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has swallowed fresh drink,
heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea,
the island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.


CHARLES KNIGHT

"They" [the Romans], says Bede, "resided within the rampart that Severus
made across the island, on the south side of it; as the cities, temples,
bridges, and paved ways do testify to this day." On the north of the