A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE fought against the Britons and slew three kings at Deorham.' The site of the battle is generally allowed to be Dyrham, a village on the turnpike road between Bath and Gloucester ; and the victory of the West Saxons naturally led to the reduction of these two towns as well as of Cirencester. These important stations of the Roman province dominated the lower valley of the Severn as well as the head waters of the Thames ; and the fall of Corinium especially must have been of primary importance to the victors, as the town lay at the junction of British and Roman high- ways to the north, to Gloucester and the Mendip Hills, to Speen and Winchester, and across to the eastern counties. That such a position was willingly surrendered is most improbable, but later events go to show that the prize was not long in the hands of Wessex. The historical records of the time are meagre, but have been amplified by conjectures that lay bare the hidden springs of diplomacy in those remote times. After the death of Cutha at Feathanleah, the Hwiccans are supposed ' to have chosen Ceol or Ceolric, Ceawlin's nephew, as their king ; and the few words of Florence of Worcester under the year 597 have been interpreted* as recording a rebellion raised against Ceawlin by his successor at the instigation of iEthelbert of Kent, who was the next ' bretwalda.' William of Malmesbury,^ who may certainly have per- petuated a local tradition of the fight, but wrote five centuries after the event, is quoted as the authority for an alliance between Britons and Angles (presumably Hwiccans) against the West Saxon conqueror, who had incurred the odium of his own kinsmen by unheard-of enormities. This explanation of the events that led to a separate West Saxon king- dom in the Severn valley is supposed to receive support from a passage in a monkish compilation of the fourteenth century * which associates the Scots in the victory over Ceawlin at Woddesbeorg in 591. This evidence is however rejected by the latest editor of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle^ and the only hope of showing the survival of British influence within the Hwiccan kingdom lies in arch^ological investigation. Whether the overthrow of Ceawlin was effected by Hwiccan or British arms, it is almost certain that the key of the west was put into Mercian hands by the understanding with Penda in 628, and that the supremacy of Wessex in the Severn valley lasted no more than half a century. While Worcester was the centre, Cirencester was in the south of the Hwiccan territory;® and in order to facilitate comparison of Anglo- Saxon relics in these parts, we may here inquire what were the natural boundaries of the kingdom of the Hwiccans ; for in early times dominion and intercourse were to a great extent limited by the physical features of the country. The Bristol Avon no doubt marks the southern limit of their dominion, while the Severn must have been a substantial barrier 1 J. R. Green, Making of England (1897), i. 236. « Thorpe's edition, p. 9 note. 3 Gesta Regum, i. 1 7.
- Fordun's Scotkhronicon, translation by W. F. Skene, bk. iii. p. 106.
6 Plummer, Two Chronicles Parallel, ii. 17. ^ Florence of Worcester, under 879. 224
