chapter 4._

The view strongly stated above, as to the completeness of the erasure of Romano-British society and influence from the whole of England except its southwestern and north· western counties, by the English conquest, is combated as strongly by another less prominent school of recent historians, represented, for example, by Mr. Henry C. Coote (The Romans of Britain) and by Mr. Charles H. Pearson, who says: "We know that fugitives from Britain settled largely during the 5th century in Armorica and in Ireland; and we may perhaps accept the legend of St. Ursula as proof that the flight, in some instances, was directed to the more civilized parts of the continent. But even the pious story of the 11,000 virgins is sober and credible by the side of that history which assumes that some million men and women were slaughtered or made homeless by a few ship-loads of conquerors."

_C. H. Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, volume 1, chapter 6._

The opinion maintained by Prof. Freeman and Mr. Green (and, no less, by Dr. Stubbs) is the now generally accepted one.

ENGLAND: 7th Century. The so-called "Heptarchy."

"The old notion of an Heptarchy, of a regular system of seven Kingdoms, united under the regular supremacy of a single over-lord, is a dream which has passed away before the light of historic criticism. The English Kingdoms in Britain were ever fluctuating, alike in their number and in their relations to one another. The number of perfectly independent states was sometimes greater and sometimes less than the mystical seven, and, till the beginning of the ninth century, the whole nation did not admit the regular supremacy of any fixed and permanent over-lord. Yet it is no less certain that, among the mass of smaller and more obscure principalities, seven Kingdoms do stand out in a marked way, seven Kingdoms of which it is possible to recover something like a continuous history, seven Kingdoms which alone supplied candidates for the dominion of the whole island." These seven kingdoms were Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, Northumberland and Mercia.

_E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest of England,