The upward career of EGBERT of Wessex (802–839) must now be briefly described. As has been said, he returned from exile on the death of his foe, Beorhtric, and apparently without a contest was raised to the West Saxon throne. On the very day of his accession there was a great fight between the Mercians, commanded by the Ealdorman of the Hwiccas and the West Saxons under the generalship of the Ealdorman of Wilts. Both Ealdormen were slain, but victory is said to have rested with the men of Wiltshire. With this exception, the first thirteen years of Egbert’s reign passed in peace. Cenwulf of Mercia, whose dominions, including, as they did, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex, wrapped Wessex all round to the east, was too powerful to be lightly assailed. When Egbert’s old patron, Charlemagne, died in 814, there was nothing to betoken that the exile whom he had befriended would achieve anything more than a petty and precarious West Saxon royalty. In the following year, however, the long-interrupted movement westward was once more resumed. Egbert “harried West Wales from east to west”; in other words, he overran Cornwall from the Tamar to the Land’s End. Though the process of subjugation was not yet complete, this was the beginning of the end of Cornish independence. In 821 Cenwulf, the powerful King of Mercia, died, and there were troubles in the palace at Lichfield. After the murder of his son, a child of seven years old, and the deposition of his brother, an usurper named Beornwulf obtained the crown. The discords thus caused gave Egbert the opportunity for which he had probably long waited. He declared war on Beornwulf, met him in battle at Ellandune, probably in the north of Wiltshire, and after a most bloody fight completely defeated him. Intent on gathering at once the most important fruits of victory, Egbert sent his son Ethelwulf to the region of Kent, where his own father had once held sway. Baldred, King of Kent, the vassal of Mercia, was expelled; the three south-eastern counties and Essex, which included the city of London, gladly accepted the rule of Egbert, who was represented by his son Ethelwulf as under-king, and the long struggle between Mercia and Wessex for the possession of that corner of England was at an end. East Anglia, with her bitter memories of Mercian perfidy, to which her King Ethelbert had fallen a victim thirty years before, now rose in rebellion, relying on the protection of Egbert, and succeeded in defeating and slaying the Mercian king (826?). After Beornwulf’s death Mercia could no longer offer any effectual resistance. Egbert was soon acknowledged as overlord, and thus by about the year 829 he had brought under his supremacy, though not under his personal rule, the whole of England south of the Humber, and acquired the mysterious title of Bretwalda, which (if the Saxon Chronicle may be trusted) had been borne by no other sovereign since the death of Oswy, a century and a half before.