upon British Ethnology. 203
a severe check about the year 520. In 633 we hear of an
alliance between Cadwallon of Wales and Penda of Mercia
against Edwin of Northumbria. About the year 777 Offa,
the powerful King of Mercia, constructed the celebrated dyke
which bears his name, and which was for centuries afterwards
the boundary between England and Wales; and at the same
time the Welsh princes removed their royal residence from
Pengwem or Shrewsbury, which became an English town.
In 813 Egbert of Wessex, who afterwards became overlord
of the whole country south of the Forth, waged a successful
war with the Devonian Britons, and fixed the boundary of
independent West Wales at the Tamar. As regards the
northern or Strathclyde Britons, we learn that the indepen-
dent British territory, which about the year 600 included
not only the western half of the Scottish Lowlands, the
whole of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and
Cheshire, but also a considerable part of West Yorkshire and
Derbyshire, and extended southward to Warwickshire, had
been diminished in the ninth century by the loss of all the
country south of the lake district. That part of the remainder
which lay between Morecambe Ray and the Solway was con-
quered by Edmund the son of Athelstan, with the help of the
king of South Wales, in the year 945, and given to Malcolm
of Scotland. The Scottish kings appear to have held Cum-
berland till the year 1072, and to have unsuccessfully claimed
its restitution, at intervals, from the kings of England down
to the time of Henry III. It is interesting to note as a result
of this specially late connection of Cumberland, among
English counties, with Scotland, that natives of Cumberland,
now living, who have found themselves classed as Scots by
natives of other northern English counties, and have objected,
have been told that anyhow they were Cumberland Scots.
And, on the other hand, as a paragraph in the 'Carlisle
Journal' of March 20, 1885 informs us, the Scottish
borderers also recognise their former connection with the
Cumberland people. Tradition states that the two bells in
Bowness Church, on the Cumberland shore of the Solway,
were stolen, one from Middlebie near Ecclefechan, the other