KINGS A-PLENTY

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 May 1937, Page 14

KINGS A-PLENTY

ENGLAND’S “DARK AGES." “There is a hardy fighting ring about the names of the kings of the kingdoms that made England when Saxon history was in the melting pot —names such as Oise and Wuffa, Off a and Coenwulf. Aerdwulf and Ceadwalla,” says Mr. .John G. Walsh, in the “Sunday Dispatch.” The kingdoms changed their boundaries month by month and year by year. _

Kent was always a kingdom; the kings of the West Saxons reigned over Wiltshire, Berkshire, Dorset, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, and gave England her first royal line. Mercia covered the counties of Gloucestershire. Worcestershire, Warwickshire. Cheshire. Derbyshire. Staffordshire. Shropshire, Hereford, Oxfordshire and Bucks, Herdforshire. Huntingdon, Northampton and Leicester. Lincolnshire and part of Bedford. The kings of the East Anglos held

territory in Cambridgeshire, while the Fast: Saxons had dominion over Essex and part, of Hertfordshire. Beyond the dominions of the Mercians were the twin kingdoms of Deiri and Bernicia. and over the Humber stretched the kingdom of Northumbria as tai' as Scotland. It. absorbed the tiny kingdoms of Lindisfarne, Loidois. and Elmet; beyond that lay the ancient kingdoms of the Piets, and the Irish

province of Dalreida. Somewhere over tlm border also lay the fabled land of King Coel. The little kingdom of Loidois exists to-day as the modern town of Leeds, and Klmet :s remembered in the placenames of Barwick-in-Flmet and Sher-burn-in-F.lmot in tho West Hiding of Yorkshire.

But before these kingdoms were hewn out of the boundaries of Roman Britain the departure of the Eagles was the signal for the birth of many minor kingdoms led by leaders of the old blood, who had not quite forgotten the glories of the ancient days. The ill-fated Vertigern was none of these. His kingdom stretched from South Wales to Hover. Out of his territory came many kingdoms, including Kent

and Wessex. The last of these Romano-British kings we hear of are called Comail, Condidan and Farinmail, who fell in

what was practically the last stand of the Britons at the battle of Doorham. A.D.. 577. With them died the old traditions; and England enters what the Ordnance Survey has called the "Dark Ages."