_Wessex._--As might naturally be expected in a chronicle having its birth-place in Winchester, the historical details as to Wessex are much fuller than for the other kingdoms; so full that it is possible to relinquish the mere annalistic form and to weave them into a continuous narrative. In 495 (more than half a century after Tiro’s date of the Saxon conquest) two chieftains, Cerdic and Cynric his son, came with five ships to a place called Cerdices ora, and on the very day of their landing fought a battle with the “Welshmen”. The scene of the landing was probably somewhere in the noble harbour of Southampton Water. The two chieftains were not as yet spoken of as kings, but bore the lower title of _ealdormen_. Of Cerdic, however, the Chronicle recites the usual half-legendary pedigree, reaching back through eight intervening links to Woden, from whom (of course under later Christian influences) the line is traced back to Noah and Adam. These pedigrees, or at least the genuine Teutonic portion of them, may very probably have been preserved in the songs of minstrels, and obviously belong to that element of the Chronicle which is independent of Bede. We may look upon the divine ancestor Woden as marking the limit of the minstrel’s memory or knowledge, and we shall therefore probably be justified in concluding that the West Saxon tribe possessed some sort of continuous historical tradition reaching back for eight generations behind Cerdic (himself a middle-aged man in 495), or about to the beginning of the third century. No wonder that kings whose very flatterers could not trace back their lineage to an earlier date than that of the Emperor Severus, felt their dynasties new and short-lived in presence of the immemorial antiquity of Rome.