"Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril of the fight is over and done." "Watch and pray," he said, when they questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.
[Sidenote: Mercian greatness] The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts pressed on the kingdom from the north AEthelred, Wulfhere's successor, attacked it on the Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace which left him master of Middle-England and free to attempt the direct conquest of the south.

For the moment this attempt proved a fruitless one.

Mercia was still too weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping from Northumbria's hands, while Wessex which seemed her destined prey rose at this moment into fresh power under the greatest of its early kings.

Ine, the West-Saxon king whose reign covered the long period from 688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war which Cenwealh and Centwine had begun.

He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier of his new conquests by a fort on the banks of the Tone which has grown into the present Taunton.