The West-Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all their settlements to the north of that river were annexed to the Mercian realm.
Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached even south of the Thames, for Sussex in its dread of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlordship, and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two outlying settlements of the Jutes--the Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras along the Southampton water--which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian arms.

The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in hand with its military advance.

The forests of its western border, the marshes of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by monastic colonies, whose success shows the hold which Christianity had now gained over its people.

Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild western woodlands and in the yet wilder fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom which stretched from the "Holland," the sunk, hollow land of Lincolnshire, to the channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters and reedy islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by flocks of screaming wild-fowl.

But in either quarter the new faith made its way.