Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/98

xo PEEFACE. states a fact, the date of which was well ascertained, while the narrative in the " Historia Britonum " is brought down, " usque ad tempus quo Ida regnavit, " qui fuit Eobba fihus, ipse fuit primus rex in " Beornicia, id est, im Berneich." It is with Bernicia alone that we have here to do, though it formed only a part of the kingdom of Northumbria ; but being that part of it which lay to the north of the river Tyne, it alone was comprised within the limits of the kingdom of Scotland in the days of Fordun. We may hold it then as certain that, prior to the year 547, there were settlements of Angles on the east coast of Britain, lying between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and that in that year, Ida had formed a kingdom in the old British district called Bryneich, the chief seat of which was the Castle of Bamborough, and which extended by degrees north- wards till it reached the Firth of Forth. Ida, according to Bede, died in the year 559, but while the possessions of the Angles in Deira, which lay south of the Tees, fell under the sway of Ella, a chief of the Angles, to whom a different pedigree is given, Ida was succeeded in Bernicia by eight of his sons, who reigned one after another. Their names are given in the additions to Nennius, but in the order in which they are stated to have reigned by him, by Florence of Worcester, and by Simeon of Durham, they diflPer very much from each other. AU the lists agree in making Adda the successor of Ida, but a comparison of the lists shows very clearly