career, to relapse into its original disunion when no longer upheld by the arm of the mightiest warrior who ever sat upon the throne of Saxon England. The dynasty of Wessex, indeed, survived the crisis; but the permanent settlement of the Northmen during these reigns, in the southern division of ancient Northumbria, introduced a foreign element between Bernicia and the Southumbrian provinces, thus preventing the consolidation of the Anglo Saxon kingdom, and contributing materially to the success of those incessant encroachments of the Scottish kings upon the Northumbrian Saxons, which were only checked by the Norman Conquest.[79] _Malcolm the First._ 943–954. [Sidenote: A. D. 943.] Malcolm, the first of his name, and a son of the second Donald, succeeded to the authority relinquished by his venerable kinsman, whilst the brother of Athelstan step by step was winning back the territories ceded to the Northmen at the commencement of his reign. The great Mercian confederacy of “the Five Burghs” was first reduced to submission, and Northumbria ere long again acknowledging the authority of the English king, [Sidenote: A. D. 944.] Olave Sitricson abandoned the province, driving Blacar Godfreyson out of Dublin, and establishing his authority over the Irish Norsemen, whilst his confederate Reginald, Blacar’s brother, disappears from history, and Edmund, released from his Danish foes, was at liberty to turn his arms against Cumberland.[80] Much confusion has arisen from the ambiguous use of the appellations of Cumbria and Cumberland. The former name was undoubtedly applied at one time to a wide extent of country stretching at least from Dumbartonshire to North Wales, from which district it was early separated when the greater part of modern Lancashire was added to the Northumbrian dominions. A little later the grants of Egfrid to St. Cuthbert must have severed the modern counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland from the northern Cumbria or Strath Clyde, which was still further curtailed by the settlements of the Angles in the diocese of Candida Casa, a district of which the greater part, if not the whole, had by this time probably fallen into the hands of the ancestors of the Picts of Galloway.