Of the various races that lay round about where the Border now is, the Northumbrians seemed at first to be the strongest. The capital of their kingdom was Bamburgh, a place still famous for its castle, though to-day it is not important enough to have a railway station! But it still looks very picturesque on the wild coast, with the Farne Islands, the first seat of Northumbrian Christianity, in the near distance. Ambition had much to do with the downfall of Northumbria. The famous King Eadbert would not rest content till he had scaled Dumbarton, the capital of Strathclyde. This was to his career what the march to Moscow was to Napoleon’s, for, though Eadbert got safely to Dumbarton (756) his army was cut to pieces in getting back again. The Northumbrians seem to have lost some of their northern lands, for they moved their capital further south, to the old Roman city of Corbridge which stood on the Tyne just where the delightful country town of that name stands to-day. In 844 a king of the Scots, named Kenneth MacAlpin, became (we don’t quite know how) king of the Picts also, joining two strong races under one ruler, and thus was powerful enough to give great trouble to the weakened kingdom of Northumbria. He several times led his army through Lothian, the district belonging to the Angles between the Forth and the Tweed, but was never quite able to conquer it. It is important to remember that up to that date Lothian had never belonged to Scotland. The appearance of the Danes added to the confusion of those restless days. For some few years it was doubtful whether Scot, Dane, or Angle would get the best of it in Northumbria. But at last the genius of Athelstan of Wessex revived the power of the Angles over the whole of that large part of the island which they had settled, right up to the Forth itself. Edinburgh was still English in 957, and the border-line was still very far from the present one. But there was no longer a king of Northumbria; only an earl, who was subject to the will of the West-Saxon kings. This fact of the dominance of the West Saxons, whose capital was far to the south at Winchester, must have added to the weakness of the Northumbrian border. By the year 963 the Scots had conquered Edinburgh, and it was now never again to return to English rule. Before very long the whole of Lothian had passed under Scottish control; but it was not yet held to be part of Scotland. Nor must it be thought that this conquest of Lothian fixed the border-line in its present position, for the king of the Scots was at that time ruler over Cumberland, which had never yet been English and was all that was left of the old British kingdom of Cumbria.