In general Beda uses the words _tribunus_ or _praefectus_ to express the authority of a royal officer either in the field or the city: with him _comes_ represents the old and proper sense of the king’s comrade, as we find it in Tacitus, and _dux_ is applied in the Roman sense to the leader or captain of a _corps d’armée_. But it is possible that in one passage he may have had something more in view, where he states that after the death of Peada, that is in 661, the dukes of the Mercians, Immin, Eaba and Eádberht rebelled against Osuuiu of Northumberland and raised Wulfhere to his father’s throne[314]; and he goes on to say that, having expelled the princes,—“principibus eiectis,”—whom the foreign king had imposed upon them, they recovered both their boundaries and their liberty. It is every way probable both that the Mercian dukes and Northumbrian princes mentioned in this passage were fiscal and administrative, not merely military officers[315]. Not much later than this we find dukes in Wessex[316] and Sussex[317]; and from this period we can follow the dukes with little intermission till the close of the genuine Anglosaxon rule with Eádmund Irensída. ----- Footnote 314: Beda, H. E. iii. 24. Footnote 315: The forged foundation charter of Peterborough mentions the following ealdormen: Immin, Eádberht, Herefrið, Wilberht, Abon.—Chron. Sax. 657. Cod. Dipl. No. 986. Footnote 316: Cod. Dipl. Nos. 31, 54, 987, etc. Footnote 317: Ibid. No. 994. Beda, H. E. iv. 13. ----- From the time of Ini of Wessex we have the means of tracing the institution with some certainty; and we may thus commence our enquiry with the first years of the eighth century, nearly one hundred years before Charlemagne modified and recast the German empire. At first the ealdormen are few in number, but increase as the circuit of the kingdom extends; we can thus follow them in connection with the political advance of the several countries, till we find at one time no less than three dukes at once in Kent, and sixteen in Mercia. This number attended a witena gemót held by Coenwulf in the year 814.