Note 18 — Chapter I · The Early History—Before A. D. 843.

Bed. Hist. Ecc., l. 2, c. 20; l. 3, c. 1, 24. Tigh. 631, 632. Nen. Geneal. Egfrid gave to St. Cuthbert Carlisle, with a circuit of fifteen miles, Creke with three miles—in short, all the open country in the north of Cumberland which was thus interposed between that district and Strath Clyde; whilst his donations of South Gedlet and Cartmel “with its Britons,” in the north of Lancashire, together with his grants on the Ribble and elsewhere to Wilfrid, shew that the greater part of Lancashire must have intervened between the Britons of English Cumbria and North Wales. Manchester and Whalley, or Billingaheth, were also in the Northumbrian territories. Sim. Dun. Hist. Dun., l. 1, c. 9. Hist. St. Cuth., p. 69. Edd. Vit. Wilf., c. 17. Chron. Sax. 798, 923. Nennius states that Cadwallader died of the great plague in Oswy’s reign, which can only refer to the pestilence of 664, though he has been purposely confounded with the West Saxon Ceadwalla, who died at Rome in 688. In spite of the assertion of Gildas, that all the records of his countrymen had perished, it was maintained that he had written a history and then destroyed it (Gild. Capit. 20); and Walter Mapes, bringing a book (as he said) from Brittany, where no other copy has ever been found, gave it to Geoffrey of Monmouth to translate. The work is called in Welsh the Brut Tyssilio, and is attributed to a certain Tyssilio living in the seventh century, who writes familiarly of Scotland, Moray, and Normandy, and brings the “Twelve Peers of France” to Arthur’s Coronation! Granting the existence of these Twelve Peers, how could Tyssilio, living in the seventh century, have been familiar with the institution of Charlemagne, who died in the ninth? In the nineteenth century the Brut has been “done into English” with some very marvellous notes, in which the curious inquirer will find Cæsar refuted by Tyssilio, and Homer corrected by Dares Phrygius!