“Greek” an exotic, and as barbarous as “Attico-Ionian” or “Anglo-Saxon?” But in our concern with the Wiccians we are exempt from this newly raised dispute. Here we have a great colony of a Saxon people who very soon fell under the dominion of Anglian kings, and so remained until a later revolution, the final supremacy of Wessex, made them once more Saxon subjects. The Wiccians, at any rate however, had become literally Anglo-Saxon: a Saxon people under Anglian rule. Shakespear was a Wiccian, born and bred--if one, who has taught us so much more than any breeding could have taught him, can be said to have been bred amongst us--at any rate he was born a Wiccian, and thereby an Anglo-Saxon, in the natural and indisputable sense: a sense earlier, stricter, and more real than that which afterwards extended the phrase to the entire kingdom. Wiccia was no doubt colonized by the Saxons, while the Saxons were yet pagan; and afterwards christianized by their Anglian Mercian subjugators. Not so the Saxons of Somerset, who were already Christians when they first penetrated that province.[8] Subsequent annals of the Chronicle shew that Wessex long remained impatient of the loss of Wiccia. In A.D. 715, a battle is shortly mentioned at a place, usually, and not impossibly, said to be Wanborough, a remarkable elevation within the fork of two great Roman ways a few miles south of Swindon. But our business is with three later entries in the Chronicle, for the three successive years 741, 742, and 743; of which the first for A.D. 741, will be first here submitted as the record of the final subjection of Wiccia, and the establishment of the Bristol Avon as the permanent southern frontier of Mercia. The other two Annals will then be otherwise disposed of. These are the words of the Chronicle:-- A.D. 741. Now Cuthred succeeded to the West-Saxon kingdom, and held it sixteen years, and he contended hardly with Æthelbald, King of the Mercians. A.D. 742. Now was a great Synod gathered at Cloveshou, and Æthelbald, King of the Mercians was there, and Cutbert, Archbishop [of Canterbury], and many other wise men. A.D. 743. Now Æthelbald, King of the Mercians, and Cuthred, King of the West-Saxons fought with the Welsh. We have in these three Annals a specimen of that condensed form and style, that is common to this ancient text and still more venerable primæval records; and which invites and justifies attempts to interpret them by the help of any existing external monuments.