In Britain itself the progress of the English arms had been gradual. Sometimes conquests from the Britons were made with great speed: sometimes the English advance was checked by successes on the British side, by mere inaction, or by wars between the different English kingdoms. The fluctuations of victory, and consequently of boundaries, between the English kingdoms were quite as marked as the warfare between the English and the Britons. ♦The English kingdoms.♦ Among the many Teutonic settlements in Britain, small and great, seven kingdoms stand out as of special importance, and three of these, _Wessex_, _Mercia_, and _Northumberland_, again stand out as candidates for a general supremacy over the whole English name. ♦Britain at the end of the eighth century.♦ At the end of the eighth century a large part of Britain remained, as it still remains, in the hands of the elder Celtic inhabitants; but the parts which they still kept were now cut off from each other. ♦Celtic states.♦ _Cornwall_ or _West-Wales_, _North-Wales_ (answering nearly to the modern principality), and _Strathclyde_ or _Cumberland_ (a much larger district than the modern county so called) were all the seats of separate, though fluctuating, British states. Beyond the Forth lay the independent kingdoms of the _Picts_ and _Scots_, which, in the course of the ninth century, became one. ♦West-Saxon supremacy under Ecgberht. 802-837.♦ It was the West-Saxon kingdom to which the supremacy over all the kingdoms of Britain, Teutonic and Celtic, came in the end. Ecgberht, its king, had been a friend and guest of Charles the Great, and he had most likely been stirred up by his example to do in his own island what Charles had done on the mainland. In the course of his reign, West-Wales was completely conquered; the other English kingdoms, together with North-Wales, were brought into a greater or less degree of dependence. But both in North-Wales and also in Mercia, Northumberland, and East-Anglia, the local kings went on reigning under the supremacy of the King of the West-Saxons, who now began sometimes to call himself _King of the English_. In the north both Scotland and Strathclyde remained quite independent. ♦The Scandinavian nations.♦