The story shows that the country was at that time covered with vast woods and forests, with fens and marshes to the east, and with wide stretches of mountain and waste on the north-west. In all these tracts, as well as in the strong cities of Roman-British origin, the natives were able to hold their own, or to make terms with their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. It was only very slowly that those who served the conquerors as slaves or villeins adopted English names, as documentary evidence shows, even in the east of England, which has been assumed rather rashly to be the most Teutonic part of the island. The bands of outlaws, who were so noted even as late as the time of Edward III. in the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, in Charnwood Forest, in Waltham Forest, and in the Fens of Bedford, Lincoln, and the East generally, were probably British refugees or their descendants. The story of Feargus it is hoped will help the reader to understand the close kinship of both English and Scots with the “Welsh.” It is certainly time that we realised the fact that those Britons whom “Anglo-Saxon” writers have despised were really at that time a civilised and Christian race who had moreover been in contact with the highest culture the world possessed for a period of no less than five hundred years. We must ultimately realise that it is to them and to the admixture of Roman blood amongst them, rather than to the savage fighting men by whom they were conquered, or to the still more ruthless Norsemen who came later, that we owe the great beginnings of the civilisation of which we make so much to-day. England in Penda’s time was broken up into at least twenty small kingdoms which were more or less independent; he made Mercia a great power by his statesman-like alliances with the smaller kingdoms and with the natives, both British and Picts, Christian and heathen. These states included the North English of the Osbert of our story; the Middle English, the South English, the Hwiccas, and the Gainas and Lindeseymen of Sigmund, whose names still survive in Gainsborough and in the district of Lindsey in Lincolnshire. To the east were the East Anglians, to the south the kingdom of Wessex. To the west of Mercia dwelt the tribes of South Wales, while the territory of the great Christian race of the Gwynedd included North Wales and stretched up into the region of Strathclyde, which, roughly speaking, was composed of Westmorland, Cumberland, and the central and, excepting Galloway, the western part of Southern Scotland as far as the river Forth and the great Romano-British city of Camelon on the Roman wall near Falkirk.