In the course of years, continual wars had removed a multitude of petty kings or chieftains from the scene; a consolidation of countries had taken place; actual sovereignty, grounded on the law of force, on possession, or on federal compacts, had raised a few of the old dynasts above the rank of their fellows; the other nobles, and families of royal lineage, had for the most part submitted to the law of the comitatus, swelling the ranks, adorning the court, and increasing the power of princes who had risen upon their degradation; and at the commencement of the seventh century, England presented the extraordinary spectacle of at least eight independent kingdoms, of greater or less power and influence, and, as we may reasonably believe, very various degrees of civil and moral cultivation. In the extreme south-eastern corner of the island was the Kentish confederation, comprising in all probability the present counties of Kent, Essex, Middlesex, Surrey, and Sussex, whose numerous kings acknowledged the supremacy of Æðelberht, the son of Eormanríc, a prince of the house of Æscings, originally perhaps a Sussex family, but who claimed their royal descent from Wóden, through Hengist, the first traditional king of Kent. Under this head three of the eight named kingdoms were thus united; but successful warlike enterprise or the praise of superior wisdom had extended the political influence of the Æscing even to the southern bank of the Humber. Next to Sussex, along the southern coast, and as far westward as the border of the Welsh in Dorsetshire or Devon, lay the kingdom of the Westsaxons or Gewissas, which stretched northward to the Thames and westward to the Severn, and probably extended along the latter river over at least a part of Gloucestershire: this kingdom, or rather confederation, comprised all or part of the following counties; Hampshire with the Isle of Wight, a tributary sovereignty; Dorsetshire, perhaps a part of Devonshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, a portion of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Middlesex, up to the Chiltern Hills. Eastanglia occupied the extreme east of the island, stretching to the north and west up to the Wash and the marshes of Lincoln and Cambridgeshire, and comprehending, together with its marches, Norfolk and Suffolk, and part at least of Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Mercia with its dependent sovereignties occupied nearly all the remaining portion of England east of the Severn and south of the Humber, including a portion of Herefordshire, and probably also of Salop, beyond the western bank of the former river: while two small kingdoms, often united into one, but when separate, called Deira and Bernicia, filled the remaining space from the Humber to the Pictish border, which may be represented by a line running irregularly north-east from Dumbarton to Inverkeithing[1]. In the extreme west the remains of the Keltic populations who had