Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/97

PREFACE. Ixxxix wall between these estuaries ; and the Picts, Scots, and Saxons were then the assailants of the pro- vince. Two centuries and a half afterwards, all four nations occupied fixed settlements in Britain, and had formed permanent kingdoms within its limits. When Bede states emphatically that, in the year Tie Angles. 449, the " Gens Anglorum sive Saxonum " had been invited by King Vortigern to protect the Britons against the Picts and Scots, and then settled for the first time in the island, there can be little doubt that he had affixed a purely artificial date to what was a mere legendary account of their first settlement ; and there is every reason to believe that tribes of the great confederate nation of the Saxons had efi'ected settlements on the east coast of Britain long before that period. The author of the " Historia Britonum," certainly writing at a period equally early, dates the first arrival of the Saxons in the 347th year after the Passion of Christ ; and in a AVelsh chronicle printed in this 'collection (No. xxvi.), the age of Vortigern is said to have been 128 years before the battle of Badwn, which the chronicle attached to the " Historia " Britonum " dates at 516, thus removing him to the year 388. When Bede, however, in the short summary contained in his last chapter, states, " Anno DXLVii. Ida regnare coepit, a quo regalis " Nordanhymljrorum prosapia originem tenet, et " duodecim annis in regno permansit," lie probably h