About 570, therefore, after a hundred and twenty years of hard fighting, the Angles and Saxons had conquered about one-half of Britain, but they were stopped by a line of hills and forests running down the centre of the island, and did not yet touch the western sea at any point. Behind this barrier dwelt the unsubdued Britons, who were styled by the English the "Welsh," or "foreigners," though they called themselves the Kymry, or "comrades." They were, now as always, divided into several kingdoms whose chiefs were perpetually at war, and failed most lamentably to support each other against the English invader. The most important of these kingdoms were Cumbria in the north, between the Clyde and Ribble, Gwynedd in North Wales, and Damnonia in Devon and Cornwall. Now and again prominent chiefs from one or other of these three realms succeeded in forcing their neighbours to combine against the Saxon enemy, and styled themselves lords of all the Britons, but the title was precarious and illusory. The Celts could never learn union or wisdom. [Illustration: LIMIT OF THE =ENGLISH= CONQUESTS, ABOUT A.D. 570.] [Sidenote: =Battle of Deorham, 577.=] The line of the British defence was at last broken in two points, and the Saxons and Angles pushed through till they touched the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. The first of the conquerors of Western Britain was Ceawlin, king of Wessex. After winning the southern midlands by a victory at Bedford in 571 he pushed along the upper Thames, and attacked the Welsh of the lower Severn. At a great battle fought at Deorham, in Gloucestershire, in 577, he slew the kings of Glevum, Corinium, and Aquae Sulis (Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath). All their realms fell into his hands, and so the West Saxons won their way to the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and cut off the Celts of Damnonia from the Celts of South Wales. [Sidenote: =Battle of Chester, 613.=] A generation later, in the year 613, Aethelfrith the Northumbrian, king of Bernicia and Deira, made a similar advance westward. In a great battle at Deva (Chester) he defeated the allied princes of Cumbria and North Wales. This fight was long remembered because of the massacre of a host of monks who had come to supplicate Heaven for the victory of the Celts over the pagan English. "If they do not fight against us with their arms, they do so with their prayers," said the Northumbrian king, and bade his warriors cut them all down. The city of Deva was sacked, and remained a mere ring of mouldering Roman walls for three centuries. The district round it became English, and thus the Cumbrians were separated from the North Welsh by a belt of hostile territory. The battles of Chester and Deorham settled the future of Britain; the Celts became comparatively helpless when they had been cut into three distinct sections, in Cumbria, Wales, and Damnonia. The future of the island now lay in the hands of the English, not in that of the ancient inhabitants of Britain.