A.D. 586.] SAXON KINGS. 53 they will accept of nothing but their heads. A t this time the church of the blessed martyr St. Alban, ' which was built after his martyrdom, of wonderful masonry, and in a style worthy of such a martyr, is believed to have been utterly thrown down and destroyed like the others, until the body of the glorious confessor and martyr was found by king Offa, to whom it was revealed by an angel, when his monastery was built. Divisions of the kingdoms and kings of England. Britain being now subdued and the natives driven out, the kings of the Angles or Saxons occupied the whole of the country, enlarged their dominions, and fixed the limits of their kingdoms according to the power of each. A t this time there reigned in the island eight kings, whose names are as follow : — Athelbert in Kent, Cissa in Sussex, Ceaulin in Wessex, Credda in Mercia, Erkenwine in Essex, Titilus in East-Anglia, Ella in Deira, and Affrid in Bernicia. These kingdoms, in process of time, were thus distinguished. The kings of Kent and of Sussex governed respectively in those provinces alone; the kings of Essex reigned in that province and in Middlesex ; the kings of East-Anglia in Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as in Cambridgeshire, until they were deprived of the last province by Offa, king of the Mercians; the kings of the Mercians reigned in the provinces of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Shropshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire; the kings of the West-Saxons reigned in the provinces of Berks, Dorset, Devon, Southampton, Surrey, Wilts, Salisbury, and Bath. These provinces being distributed among six kings, they very soon were in turn involved in civil, and more than civil, wars. Two kings reigned in Northumberland from the great river Humber unto the sea of Scotland ; but of them sufficient has been said above. When these kingdoms were thus settled, it pleased these kings wholly to obliterate Britain, and the memory of the Britons ; wherefore, with one consent, they determined that the island should no longer be called Britain from Brutus, but Anglia, or England.