led to ask, were these three properties really equivalent to a tenth of all Cornwall; for if so, it is very noteworthy to find such large estate units already evolved as early as 825. All that can be said in answer is that the evidence of Domesday Book, written 260 years later, does not altogether bear out this conclusion, but yet is more in harmony with it than might have been expected; for that survey credits these three properties with 130 ploughlands, which is about an eighteenth part of the total ploughlands recorded for all Cornwall. At any rate, then, we may regard this gift as transferring a very considerable stretch of land, and its effect would be to open up West Wales not a little to English influences. Little, however, seems actually to have been done in the way of settling West Saxon colonists in the country, if we may judge from the sparsity of the English type of place-name everywhere but in the Tamar valley. The rest of Cornwall remains to this day a land of "trefs," that is to say, of petty hamlets, bearing such names as Trenance, Tregony and Trevelyan, of which quite a handful are required to form a parish, although this is not called after any one of them, but by the name of the saint to whom the church is dedicated. Nor would it seem were new local divisions introduced by the conquerors. The so-called Cornish shires, such as Pydershire or Wivelshire, seem to be really the old Welsh "cantrefs." The term "shire" must however have been applied to them almost from the first conquest; for King Alfred's will only sixty years later has an allusion to "Streatnet on Triconshire," that is to say to Stratton near Bude in Triggshire.
The settlement of Cornwall was hardly effected when news came that the Mercians had again invaded Wiltshire. Ecgbert thereupon led his army eastwards and came up with Beornwulf's forces at Ellandum, a village near Swindon now called Nether Wroughton, but as late as the fourteenth century known as Elynton[1]. A pitched battle ensued in which the Mercians were completely routed. This victory must be regarded as a turning point in England's development, for it led to a permanent alteration of the balance of power in England in favour of the West Saxons. To follow up his advantage, Ecgbert at once despatched his son, Aethelwulf, accompanied by Bishop Ealhstan, against Kent, a district which he could claim with some show of reason as he was the son of Ealhmund. Aethelwulf's march was as successful as his father's. Baldred, the Kentish under-king, appointed by Mercia, soon fled northwards over the Thames, and thereupon, as the chronicle has it, the men of Kent and Surrey submitted to Wessex, admitting that "they had been wrongly forced from Ecgbert's kin." Sussex and Essex a few weeks later followed suit; and finally the East Anglians also rose, and re-established their independence of Mercia, by attacking Beornwulf from the east and slaying him in battle.
No series of events could well be more dramatic than the successive
- ↑ Feudal Aids v. 207; Domesday Book, i. 65 b. Eleudune.
