The following are given passages.
Passage 1:
Serres Province
Serres Province was one of the four provinces of Serres Prefecture of Greece. Its territory corresponded with that of the current municipalities Emmanouel Pappas and Serres, and part of the municipality Irakleia. It was abolished in 2006.
Passage 2:
Kavangoland
Kavangoland was a bantustan in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing homeland for the Kavango people. After the legal framework was established in 1968 as the Development of Self-Government for Native Nations in South-West Africa Act, 1968 (Act No. 54 of 1968), Kavangoland was set up in 1970 and self-government was granted in 1973. The Kavango Legislative Council had its administrative headquarters in Rundu; its first session opened in October 1970 in the presence of the South African Minister for Bantu Administration and Development.
Kavangoland, like other homelands in South West Africa, was abolished in May 1989 at the start of the transition to independence.
Sebastian Kamwanga, Hompa (king) of the Gciriku and member of the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA) was the political representative of Kavangoland from 1981 to 1989.
Passage 3:
Smolensk Governorate
Smolensk Governorate (Russian: Смоленская губерния, romanized: Smolenskaja gubernija), or the Government of Smolensk, was an administrative division (a guberniya) of the Tsardom of Russia, the Russian Empire, and the Russian SFSR. It existed, with interruptions, between 1708 and 1929.
Smolensk Governorate, together with seven other governorates, was established on December 29 [O.S. December 18], 1708, by an edict from Tsar Peter the Great. As with the rest of the governorates, neither the borders nor internal subdivisions of Smolensk Governorate were defined; instead, the territory was defined as a set of cities, and section of lands adjacent to those cities.

History
On July 28 [O.S. July 17], 1713, Smolensk Governorate was abolished and its territory was divided between Moscow and Riga Governorates. Smolensk Province was created as a result. The governorate was re-established in 1726, and Smolensk Province was re-incorporated into the Governorate. In 1775, it was included, along with parts of Moscow and Belgorod Governorates, into Smolensk Viceroyalty. The governorate was again restored in 1796.
After the October Revolution, Smolensk Governorate was base of independent Western Oblast/Western Commune, Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus, Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Litbel), and finally incorporated into the Russian SFSR.
Eventually, on January 14, 1929, Smolensk Governorate was abolished and its territory was incorporated into Western Oblast.

Subdivisions
Smolensk Governorate, together with seven other governorates, was established on December 29 [O.S. December 18], 1708, by Tsar Peter the Great's edict. As with the rest of the governorates, neither the borders nor internal subdivisions of Smolensk Governorate were defined; instead, the territory was defined as a set of cities and the lands adjacent to those cities.At the time of establishment, the following thirty cities were included into Smolensk Governorate,
In 1713, when Smolensk Governorate was abolished and merged into Riga Governorate, the following five uyezds were established in the area formally occupied by the governorate (the administrative centers are given in parentheses),
Belsky Uyezd (Bely);
Dorogobuzhsky Uyezd (Dorogobuzh);
Roslavlsky Uyezd (Roslavl);
Smolensky Uyezd (Smolensk);
Vyazemsky Uyezd (Vyazma).After Smolensk Governorate was re-established in 1726, it was subdivided into these five uyezds.
In 1775, Smolensk Viceroyalty was subdivided into 12 uyezds, which remained when it was transformed back to a governorate in 1802
(the administrative centers, which all had the town status, are in parentheses),
Belsky Uyezd (Bely);
Dorogobuzhsky Uyezd (Dorogobuzh);
Dukhovshchinsky Uyezd (Dukhovshchina);
Gzhatsky Uyezd (Gzhatsk);
Krasninsky Uyezd (Krasny);
Porechsky Uyezd (Porechye);
Roslavlsky Uyezd (Roslavl);
Smolensky Uyezd (Smolensk);
Sychyovsky Uyezd (Sychyovka);
Vyazemsky Uyezd (Vyazma);
Yelninsky Uyezd (Yelnya);
Yukhnovsky Uyezd (Yukhnov).

Demography
Language
Population by mother tongue according to the Imperial census of 1897.

Religion
According to the Imperial census of 1897.
Passage 4:
Damaraland
Damaraland was a name given to the north-central part of what later became Namibia, inhabited by the Damaras. It was bounded roughly by Ovamboland in the north, the Namib Desert in the west, the Kalahari Desert in the east, and Windhoek in the south.
In the 1970s the name Damaraland was revived for a bantustan in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), intended by the apartheid government to be a self-governing homeland for the Damara people. A centrally administered local government was created in 1980. The bantustan Damaraland was situated on the western edge of the territory that had been known as Damaraland in the 19th century.
Damaraland, like other homelands in South West Africa, was abolished in May 1989 at the start of the transition to independence.
The name Damaraland predates South African control of Namibia, and was described as "the central portion of German South West Africa" in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.

See also
Apartheid
Bantustans in South West Africa
Leaders of Damaraland
Diocese of Namibia (formerly Diocese of Damaraland)
Passage 5:
Pyrgiotissa
Pyrgiotissa was a province of Heraklion Prefecture, Crete, Greece. Its territory corresponded with that of the current municipal unit Tympaki. It was abolished in 2006.
Passage 6:
Mercian Supremacy
The Mercian Supremacy was the period of Anglo-Saxon history between c. 716 and c. 825, when the kingdom of Mercia dominated the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy in England. Sir Frank Stenton apparently coined the phrase, arguing that Offa of Mercia, who ruled 757–796, effectively achieved the unification of England south of the Humber estuary. Scholastic opinion on the relationship between the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia at this time remains divided.
While the precise period during which the Mercian Supremacy existed remains uncertain – depending upon whether one includes the reigns of Penda (c. 626–655) and Wulfhere (658–675) – the end of the era is generally agreed to be around 825, following the defeat of King Beornwulf at the Battle of Ellandun (near present-day Swindon).
Nicholas Brooks noted that "the Mercians stand out as by far the most successful of the various early Anglo-Saxon peoples until the later ninth century" and with the exception of three years under Northumbrian domination, this is true between the years 633 and 825.Recorded by Bede as the nemesis of early Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, Penda of Mercia achieved an early expansion of his kingdom's territory, but his reign ended with his death in battle, which was followed by a brief three-year period when Northumbria ruled over the Mercians. The rebellion against Northumbria by Penda's son Wulfhere in 658 immediately preceded the restoration of Penda's kingdom and a period of expansion in which Mercia's influence reached as far south as the Isle of Wight. During this period of expansion, Mercia lost its province of the Kingdom of Lindsey to Northumbria in 661, but its recapture by Æthelred of Mercia following the Battle of the Trent in 679 secured Mercia's position as the dominant Anglo-Saxon power for over a century.
Mercia's hold over the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Essex, Sussex and Kent seems to have been tenuous until 716, when Æthelbald of Mercia restored Mercia's hegemony for over forty years. Offa's accession in 757 heralded the beginning of a golden age for Mercia. Some historians have suggested that Offa's defeat of the Welsh and the West Saxons of Wessex established the Mercian Supremacy, which remained unchallenged until 825 when Egbert of Wessex supported an East Anglian rebellion against Beornwulf of Mercia, whose defeat at Ellendun effectively brought the Supremacy to an end.
Passage 7:
Capital punishment in New Zealand
Capital punishment in New Zealand – the process of sentencing convicted offenders to death for the most serious crimes (capital crimes) and carrying out that sentence, as ordered by a legal system – first appeared in a codified form when New Zealand became a British colony in 1840. It was first carried out with a public hanging in Victoria Street, Auckland in 1842, while the last execution occurred in 1957 at Mount Eden Prison, also in Auckland.  In total, 85 people have been executed in New Zealand.Capital punishment was first abolished for murder in 1941 by the First Labour Government, with all death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. However, the succeeding First National Government reinstated it in 1949, following which eight more executions took place in the period up to 1957. Subsequently, public opinion turned against the use of capital punishment, and it was once again abolished for murder in 1961, and abolished for all crimes, including treason, in 1989.

Method
The method of execution was always by hanging. At first, there were many possible execution sites all around the country, but later, the only two cities where hangings were carried out were Wellington (the capital) and Auckland (now the largest city).
Initially, there was no professional hangman employed—the executioner was simply chosen from among any who were deemed qualified. On occasion, convicted criminals were employed as hangmen, often in exchange for reduced sentences or monetary reward. In 1877, the sheriff of Blenheim recommended that a professional executioner be hired. Tom Long, an Irishman who claimed to have been an executioner in Australia, was hired as the official hangman. He was the only official hangman to be publicly known; others remained anonymous.

History
At the time of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 when New Zealand became a British colony, the most current legislation governing capital punishment in England, and henceforth New Zealand, was the Punishment of Offences Act (1837), which had abolished the death penalty for a number of statutory offences, including cattle stealing, and replaced it with penal transportation for life. However, some capital crimes remained on the British law books, including murder, treason, espionage, arson in the royal dockyards, and piracy with violence.All those executed were convicted of murder, with the exception of Hamiora Pere, who was convicted of treason in 1869. All bar one were men; the exception being Minnie Dean, who was found guilty of infanticide in 1895. However, before Dean's trial, imprisonment and execution, several other women had been found guilty of Infanticide in nineteenth-century New Zealand, but had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. These were Caroline Whitting (1872), Phoebe Veitch (1883) and Sarah-Jane and Anna Flannagan (1891).

Public executions
The first eight executions were carried out in public, from 1842 to 1858; five outside the gate of the Auckland Gaol on the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West in central Auckland; one on King Edward Parade on the waterfront at Devonport; and two outside Mount Cook Gaol in Wellington, which is today the site of the Dominion Museum building and National War Memorial on Puke Ahu.At the first execution, on 7 March 1842, approximately a thousand people gathered at the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West, now the centre of the Auckland CBD, to witness the hanging of Wiremu Kīngi Maketū. He had been found guilty of murdering five people on Motuarohia Island, in the Bay of Islands. The people killed were Thomas Bull, employed by Elisabeth Roberton, who was also murdered along with her son aged eight, her daughter of two, and a girl of nearly three named Isabella Brind, the natural daughter of one Captain Brind by a Māori woman, the daughter of Rewa, chief of Ngapuhi in that area. Mrs Roberton's husband, Captain John Roberton, had drowned prior in Paroa Bay, just opposite the island. Thomas Bull had a reputation for strength and brutality. He seemed at all times to have made a set at Maketū and had on several occasions struck, thrown, or otherwise maltreated him. Maketū was unable to defend himself against such an opponent; nor indeed did it conform with his notions of dignity to do so, he being (by virtue of his chiefly rank) above combat with one who was a servant and whom he therefore regarded on the same plane as a slave. Maketū, therefore, bided his time for revenge. Maketū then killed Thomas Bull in the night with an axe; he then brutally murdered Mrs Roberton, who was shouting abuse at him and then went to murder the two girls (ransacking the house and then burning Mrs Roberton and the two children within it). The boy ran up Pa Hill, where Maketū chased him and threw him off the 200-foot (60 m) cliff. He was sentenced to death by an all-white jury (his defence had wanted a half-white, half-Māori jury) in an Auckland court, and executed on 7 March 1842.

The second execution in New Zealand was the public hanging of Joseph Burns on 17 June 1848. On the day of his execution, he was paraded down Auckland's Queen St, seated in a coffin, and taken by boat across the Waitemata Harbour to the Devonport waterfront, where he was hanged on King Edward Parade, not far from the scene of his crimes. Burns was the first European settler to be executed in New Zealand.The third execution in New Zealand, and first in Wellington, occurred on 19 April 1849. Maroro of Ngāti Kahungunu descent was hanged outside Mount Cook Gaol in front of approximately 500 people, following his conviction of the murder of John Branks and his three children.The fourth execution occurred in the same location in Wellington on 17 June 1850, in front of a similar sized crowd, when William Good was hanged for the murder of John Ellis. The scaffold was "erected on Cook's Mount, immediately in front of the brick wall of the gaol."The fifth execution was that of escaped Australian convict, William Bowden, on 27 April 1852. He was hanged on the scaffold erected outside the entrance gate of the Auckland Gaol, on the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West, in front of approximately 300 people.The sixth execution in New Zealand, and the third public hanging to take place outside the Auckland Gaol on the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets was that of Charles Marsden on 12 February 1856. It took approximately 14 minutes for Marsden to die, with accusations that his execution was "clumsily performed".The seventh execution took place in Auckland at sunrise on 11 July 1856 with the public hanging of John White. In a sign of changing attitudes to the spectacle of public executions, the Superintendent had ordered that the scaffold be erected after dark the previous evening, and the front of the scaffold, under the drop, be partially boarded up. Due to the early hour of the execution, no more than twenty to thirty people witnessed the event on the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West.The last public execution was that of John Killey, who had been found guilty of murdering John Butler in Whangarei on 17 December 1857. At his later sentencing in Auckland, the judge, Sir George Alfred Arney, was "said to have been moved to tears" in passing sentence, while Killey "fell down in the dock in a fainting fit". He was hanged on 18 March 1858, also outside the gate of the Auckland Gaol.

Move to abolish public executions in the British colonies of Australasia
Throughout the British colonies of Australasia public hangings came to be seen as "barbarous spectacles". The last public hanging in Sydney took place outside Darlinghurst Gaol on 21 September 1852, in which local press noted disapprovingly the "extraordinary attendance of children, upon whose tender minds the shocking spectacle of a fellow creature dangling at the end of a rope, had no other more serious effect than that of eliciting from them three cheers for the hangman". New South Wales, where public executions were also "associated with the hated convict era", became the first of the British colonies in Australia to abolish public executions, when the Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals 1855 (NSW) came into force on 10 January 1855.Victoria and Tasmania followed shortly after with the Private Execution Act 1855 (Vic) and the Criminals’ Execution Act 1855 (Tas) respectively. When the Moreton Bay settlement separated from NSW to become the self-governing colony of Queensland in 1859, the New South Wales legislation automatically applied.While South Australia and Western Australia abolished public executions in 1858 and 1870 respectively, both colonies subsequently passed amendments which allowed for the hanging of capitally convicted Aboriginal Australians at the scene of their alleged crimes: the Act to Amend an Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals 1861 (SA) and the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1871 Amendment Act 1875 (WA).In New Zealand, public executions were abolished under Section 1 of the Executions of Criminals Act 1858, which specified that executions had to be carried out "within the walls or the enclosed yard of some gaol, or within some other enclosed space". The Act came into force on 3 June 1858, three months after the country's last public hanging in central Auckland.By way of comparison with other English-speaking countries which share an historical legacy of English common law, the last public execution in the United Kingdom was the hanging of Michael Barrett outside Newgate Prison in London on 26 May 1868, in front of a crowd of approximately 2000 people. Canada's last public execution occurred on 7 December 1869 when Nicholas Melady was hanged in front of "a few hundred spectators", outside the Huron County Gaol, now called the Huron Historic Gaol, in Goderich, Ontario. The last judicial execution carried out in public in the United States was the hanging of Rainey Bethea in a parking lot in Owensboro, Kentucky on 14 August 1936, in front of an estimated crowd of 20,000.

Executed out of public view
In 1862, in Wellington, James Collins became the first person in New Zealand to be executed out of public view.In 1866, the site of the old Auckland Gaol was made ready for a temporary market. The Sheriff approved the removal of the graves of the five executed criminals, to respect "public decency". The bodies were reinterred in "a remote and unused spot" of the Symonds St Cemetery.The last person to be executed was Walter James Bolton, for poisoning his wife, on 18 February 1957.

Abolition: 1949–1961
When the Labour Party formed its first government following the 1935 general election, it commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment. The Crimes Amendment Act 1941  changed the penalty for murder from death to life imprisonment with hard labour. The only crimes for which the death penalty still applied were treason and piracy.
The Labour Party lost power to the more conservative National Party, which had pledged to reintroduce capital punishment, in 1949. During that earlier period, support and opposition for capital punishment were clearly delineated on partisan grounds. The National Party supported the restoration and maintenance of the death penalty, while the Labour Party opposed it. During debate over the Capital Punishment Act 1950 (which exempted expectant mothers and young persons under the age of 18 years), Labour expressed concern about the constitutional implications of the concentration of executive power in this context (although Labour had used this power from 1935 to 1941), while National Party Attorney-General Clifton Webb referred to the alleged "deterrent" value of the death penalty as potential threat and punitive severity. However, Webb was relatively sparing in his use of the death penalty, while his successor, Attorney-General Jack Marshall (1955–1957), was a hardliner on that issue and the number and pace of executions accelerated, arousing debate.
During the time that the National Party was in office (1949–1957), 36 people were convicted of murder, and 22 of those were sentenced to death (George Horry was convicted of murder in 1951 but not hanged because the death penalty was not in force in 1942). The final decision on executions rested with Cabinet, and only eight of the condemned were executed. The rest were commuted to life imprisonment. Even then, professional opinion was divided. Film censor Gordon Mirams did not regard spectacles of hanging as appropriate content within crime dramas and western films and excised such content and dialogue on the basis of family propriety.According to Department of Justice historian Pauline Engel, the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1953) may have heavily influenced the rise of abolitionism, as did the controversies that surrounded the executions of Harry Whiteland and Edward Te Whiu, which raised questions about post-war trauma, intellectual and developmental disability as factors for leniency.
Social historian Redmer Yska has argued that such concern arose much earlier. When the National Party restored capital punishment in 1950, it became an administrative ordeal for civil servants involved, particularly those within correctional facilities like Mount Eden Prison in Auckland, law enforcement and the judiciary. Corrections staff needed to maintain suicide watch for the convicted felon, conduct regular health checks and provide pastoral care for the condemned individual's relatives, as well as insure prison security during executions.Official requirements mandated the presence of a magistrate, doctor and sheriffs. During the late fifties, Attorney-General Jack Marshall accelerated the pace of executions and post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism and duodenal haemorrhaging developed amongst two of the three staff obliged to participate during execution procedures. In cases of political import, prudent reprieves and commuted penalties did occur, as happened when three Niue Islanders were sentenced to death after killing a manifestly brutal and oppressive Resident Commissioner (and were reprieved only after New Zealand prison officials had reached Niue to carry out the hangings). On that occasion, the Public Questions Committee of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand became involved in strenuously lobbying against the verdict.Class differences were also seen to affect the verdict. Dr. Senga Wintringham was convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder, in February 1955, after shooting and killing Dr Bill Saunders. Wintringham claimed that she had only meant to intimidate him, rather than kill him. The Peoples Voice, newspaper of the Communist Party of New Zealand, criticised the perceived "double standard" in this context, as the courts had just convicted and sentenced 26-year-old British migrant and itinerant labourer Frederick Foster to death, despite questions about mental illness and intellectual impairment in his context, as well as appeals from his mother. Foster had shot and killed Sharon Skeffington, his former girlfriend. Although Foster was sentenced to death and executed, defence counsel Dr Martyn Finlay succeeded in raising questions about the limited intellectual capabilities and mental health of the condemned person in this context. Similar questions would arise in the trial, conviction and execution of Albert Webb. The New Zealand Listener editorialised against the death penalty in July 1955, and received supportive feedback from its letters page correspondents.Eddie Te Whiu was hanged in August 1955, after he had killed an elderly widow in Ngararatunua, near Kamo, when an attempted burglary went wrong. Abolitionist sentiment grew again, as, with the Foster and Black cases, there was perceptible anxiety about the failure of "deterrence" value in the context of violent homicides, and whether Te Whiu should have been convicted of manslaughter instead, due to his dysfunctional family origins and limited intellectual capabilities. As a result, a National Committee for Abolition of the Death Penalty was formed in November 1956, with branches in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.
Engel and Maureen Garing have drawn attention to the involvement of Protestant Christian opposition to capital punishment. In 1941 and 1951, the Christian Social Justice League, Christchurch Anglican Diocesan Synod and Methodist Public Questions Committee supported abolition, as did individual Catholics, although their hierarchy remained neutral in this debate. The New Zealand Theosophical Society also opposed capital punishment, and the Churches of Christ and Baptist Union declared its opposition in the late fifties. As religious opposition grew, it provided opponents of capital punishment with an organisational base that was used to good effect. Redmer Yska notes that clergy often refused to participate in legitimising executions through their presence, of whatever denomination.As a consequence of controversy over the perceived escalation in use of capital punishment, abolitionist petitions started to circulate as well. In 1956, a proposal for a referendum on capital punishment was put forward by the Minister of Justice, Jack Marshall. This referendum was to be voted on during the 1957 general election, but the proposal was defeated.Meanwhile, Walter James Bolton (1888–1957) was executed at Mount Eden Prison in Auckland in February 1957, after he had allegedly poisoned his wife with arsenic. Given that the National Party lost that election, there were to be no further executions within New Zealand. However, while the election saw a short-lived Labour government elected, capital punishment was not debated in Parliament again before the National party regained power after the 1960 election.
In 1961, the National Party reaffirmed its support for the death penalty, although restricted its use to premeditated murders, and those committed during another crime or during an escape from custody. The issue of capital punishment generated intensive debate within the National Party—the Minister of Justice in the Second National Government, who was responsible for introducing the Crimes Bill 1961, Ralph Hanan, strongly opposed the death penalty, while Jack Marshall, the Deputy Prime Minister, had supported its use while serving as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, as noted above.

Abolition and its aftermath: 1961 onwards
Aware of growing public opposition to capital punishment, the National Party allowed its MPs to exercise a conscience vote in Parliament, and ten National MPs subsequently voted in favour of abolition. The result was a majority of 11 against capital punishment, 41–30. The ten National MPs were Ernest Aderman, Gordon Grieve, Ralph Hanan, Duncan MacIntyre, Robert Muldoon, Lorrie Pickering, Logan Sloane, Brian Talboys, Esme Tombleson and Bert Walker. The death penalty was therefore abolished for murder, being retained only for treason and other similar acts in theory. In principle, this meant that de facto abolition had occurred from that point onward.These last theoretical vestiges of capital punishment were abolished under the Palmer Labour cabinet in November 1989 with the passage of the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act 1989, and there were no further executions during the interim period. Passage of the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act ended all capital punishment in New Zealand. The Cook Islands, which based its statutes on New Zealand law, formally retained the death penalty for treason until it was abolished in 2007. The death penalty was never used in the Cook Islands.Occasional calls to reinstate capital punishment still occur, but no major political party has made capital punishment an element of any of their election manifestos since the 1989 Abolition act. As for minor political parties, the solitary exception was the fundamentalist Christian Heritage New Zealand, which has been defunct since 2005.
A 2004 1 News Colmar Brunton  poll found 28% were in favour of bringing back the death penalty, 67% did not want to bring the death penalty back, and 5% were undecided. In a 2013 Curia poll for TV3's The Nation, 38% of New Zealanders were in favour of the death penalty—a nominal increase from the 28% in 2004—while 55% were opposed it, and 7% were undecided. Also in the poll, 35% of Labour voters favoured the death penalty and National voters' support polled at 44%. Least likely to be in favour were Green Party voters at 19%, but the strongest support came from New Zealand First voters at 84%.

See also
Capital punishment in the Cook Islands
List of people executed in New Zealand
Passage 8:
Lakes, Cumbria
Lakes is a civil parish in Westmorland and Furness, England. In the 2001 census the parish had a population of 5,127, decreasing at the 2011 census to 4,420. It covers the town of Ambleside, and the villages and hamlets of Clappersgate, Rydal, Grasmere, Troutbeck, Chapel Stile, Elterwater, Little Langdale and Waterhead.
Lakes CP incorporates within its boundaries the wards of Ambleside, the Langdales, Rydal & Loughrigg, Grasmere and Troutbeck.The parish was formed in 1934 as an urban district, despite being largely rural, under a County Review Order, by a merger of Ambleside and Grasmere urban districts and parts of Windermere Urban District, South Westmorland Rural District and West Ward Rural District.The A591 road, a primary route, passes through the centre of the CP, it enters the parish from the South at the point where it crosses Trout Beck at Troutbeck Bridge village. After covering 16 km (10 mi) in road distance,(13.4 km (8.5 mi) as the crow flies) it leaves the parish at Dunmail Raise. The A592 road passes through the eastern area of the parish. The col of the Kirkstone Pass, at a point approximately 200 m north of the Kirkstone Inn, marks the northern boundary of Lakes CP.It is the area covered by the Kelsick Foundation, an organisation that helps locals with the costs of extra-curricular activities for children.
The urban district had an area of 49,917 acres (202.01 km2). or 202 km².
The urban district was abolished in 1974, with the Patterdale ward becoming a civil parish in the Eden district, and the rest becoming a civil parish in South Lakeland.

See also
Listed buildings in Lakes, Cumbria
Passage 9:
Mountain (electoral district)
Mountain is a former provincial electoral division in Manitoba, Canada.  It was created for the 1879 provincial election, and was abolished shortly before the 1958 election.
Mountain was located in southwestern Manitoba, near Portage la Prairie.  The constituency was mostly rural, and included communities such as Baldur and Argyles.  Premier Dufferin Roblin once referred to the division's name as "curious", given that it marked by "the gentle landscape of the Pembina escarpment".Several prominent Manitoba politicians represented Mountain, including Charles Cannon, Ivan Schultz and Premier Thomas Greenway.  The constituency was shaped like an "L" in the nineteenth century, and was sometimes called "Greenway's armchair".  For most of its history, Mountain was considered safe for the Manitoba Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal-Progressive Party. But an effort was made to put forward an Independent third-party candidate in 1914.In 1955, Mountain's population was estimated to be about 50% Anglo-Saxon, 33% French Canadian, and 16.5% Flemish.

Provincial representatives
Passage 10:
Franklin District
Franklin District was a New Zealand territorial authority that lay between the Auckland metropolitan area and the Waikato Plains. As a formal territory, it was abolished on 31 October 2010 and divided between Auckland Council in the Auckland Region (39.82 percent by land area) to the north and Waikato and Hauraki districts in the Waikato region (60.18 percent) to the south and east. The Auckland portion is now part of the Franklin ward, which also includes rural parts of the former Manukau City.
Before its abolition, it was administered from the town of Pukekohe. Out-going Franklin District Mayor Mark Ball had proposed that Franklin district become an independent unitary authority, fulfilling both the functions of a local and regional council. However, this was rejected by Minister Rodney Hide.

Location and extent
The district was bounded in the north by the start of the Auckland metropolitan area and the waters of the Manukau Harbour. Awhitu Peninsula stretches up the Tasman coast to the mouth of this harbour. Here are located several holiday spots, such as Karioitahi Beach and Matakawau.
To the south, Franklin was bounded by the fertile lowlands of the Waikato Plains. In the east, the land rises to the Hunua Ranges, then falls to the coast of the Firth of Thames. In the west is the Tasman Sea.  The Waikato River mouth is at Port Waikato in the south of the region. This is renowned as a good place for surfcasting.
The area is mainly rural, with local settlements such as Waiuku and Tuakau supporting the farming industry. One industry of note is the New Zealand Steel steel mill at Glenbrook, north of Waiuku.

Mayors
Six people served as mayor of Franklin District during its 21-year existence:

Nomenclature
The name of "Franklin" probably derives from Lady Jane Franklin, an early British traveller and the wife of Captain Sir John Franklin,
who served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (1837–1843). Lady Franklin visited the Waikato Heads in 1841.

Media
Franklin County News, a twice-weekly newspaper based in Pukekohe, serves the former Franklin district. The Post Newspaper distributes 26,000 printed copies weekly on a Tuesday, covering Franklin and North Waikato. The Post Newspaper has an office in both Pukekohe and Waiuku. In 2015, the online events calendar and photo news Franklin Life NZ was launched.

Populated centres
Here are some of the following suburbs, towns, villages and other settlements within the former Franklin District's territorial area borders, grouped into their present-day adjacent areas:
Northern Franklin (now part of Auckland Super-City)

Wattle Bay, Orua Bay, Big Bay, Grahams Beach, Awhitu, Kauritutahi, Matakawau, Matakawau Point, Clarks Beach, Pollok, Te Toro, Glenbrook Beach, Waiau Beach, Mission Bush, Karioitahi, Waiuku, Kingseat, Waiau Pa, Patumahoe, Te Hihi, Karaka, Roseneath Road, Paerata, Pukekohe, Bombay, Ararimu, Hunua,Southern Franklin (now part of Waikato District)

Otaua, Aka Aka, Tuakau, Buckland, Paparimu, Pōkeno, Port Waikato, Mercer, Mangatāwhiri, Onewhero, Pukekawa, Glen Murray, Naike, Mangatangi, Limestone DownsNorth Eastern Franklin (now part of Hauraki District)

Waharau, Whakatīwai, Kaiaua, Miranda
Passage 11:
Mercia
Mercia (, Old English: Miercna rīċe; Latin: Merciorum regnum) was one of the three notable Anglic kingdoms founded after Sub-Roman Britain was settled by Anglo-Saxons in an era called the Heptarchy. It was centred on the River Trent and its tributaries, in a region now known as the Midlands of England.
A Latinisation of an Old English word derived from the Mercian Old English, Merce, meaning "borderland" (whence the Modern English words mark and march), the kingdom was rendered as Mierce or Myrce in the West Saxon dialect. The name is still used as a geographic designation by a wide range of organisations: military units, public, commercial and voluntary bodies.The royal court moved around the kingdom without a fixed capital city. Early in its existence Repton seems to have been the location of an important royal estate. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it was from Repton in 873–874 that the Great Heathen Army deposed the King of Mercia. Slightly earlier, King Offa seems to have favoured Tamworth. It was there where he was crowned and spent many a Christmas.
For 300 years (between 600 and 900), known as Mercian Supremacy or the "Golden Age of Mercia", having annexed or gained submissions from five of the other six kingdoms of the Heptarchy (East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex), Mercia dominated England south of the Humber estuary. During King Offa's reign, a dyke was created as the boundary between Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms. Nicholas Brooks noted that "the Mercians stand out as by far the most successful of the various early Anglo-Saxon peoples until the later ninth century", and some historians, such as Sir Frank Stenton, believe the unification of England south of the Humber estuary was achieved during Offa's reign.King Peada converted to Christianity around 656, the Diocese of Mercia was founded in this year, with the first bishop (Diuma) based at Repton. The religion firmly established in the kingdom by the late 7th century. After 13 years at Repton, 669 AD, Saint Chad (the fifth bishop) moved the bishopric to Lichfield and, in 691 AD, the Diocese of Mercia became the Diocese of Lichfield. There has been a diocese based in the city ever since. For a brief period between 787 and 799 or 803 the diocese was an archbishopric. The current bishop, Michael Ipgrave, is the 99th since the diocese was established.
At the end of the 9th century, following the invasions of the Vikings and their Great Heathen Army, Danelaw absorbed much of the former Mercian territory. Danelaw at its height included London, all of East Anglia and most of the North of England.
The final Mercian king, Ceolwulf II, died in 879 with the kingdom appearing to have lost its political independence. Initially, it was ruled by a lord or ealdorman under the overlordship of Alfred the Great, who styled himself "King of the Anglo-Saxons". The kingdom had a brief period of independence in the mid-10th century and in 1016, by which time it was viewed as a province with temporary independence. Wessex conquered and united all the kingdoms into the Kingdom of England. The kingdom became an earldom until 1071.

History
Early history
Mercia's exact evolution at the start of the Anglo-Saxon era remains more obscure than that of Northumbria, Kent, or even Wessex. Mercia developed an effective political structure and was Christianised later than the other kingdoms. Archaeological surveys show that Angles settled the lands north of the River Thames by the 6th century. The name "Mercia" is Mercian Old English for "boundary folk" (see Welsh Marches), and the traditional interpretation is that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the native Welsh and the Anglo-Saxon invaders. However, Peter Hunter Blair argued an alternative interpretation: that they emerged along the frontier between Northumbria and the inhabitants of the Trent river valley.Although its earliest boundaries remain obscure, a general agreement persists that the territory that was called "the first of the Mercians" in the Tribal Hidage covered much of south Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire and northern Warwickshire.The earliest person named in any records as a king of Mercia is Creoda, said to have been the great-grandson of Icel. Coming to power around 584, he built a fortress at Tamworth which became the seat of Mercia's kings. His son Pybba succeeded him in 593. Cearl, a kinsman of Creoda, followed Pybba in 606; in 615, Cearl gave his daughter Cwenburga in marriage to Edwin, king of Deira, whom he had sheltered while he was an exiled prince.The Mercian kings were the only Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy ruling house known to claim a direct family link with a pre-migration Continental Germanic monarchy.

Penda and the Mercian Supremacy
The next Mercian king, Penda, ruled from about 626 or 633 until 655. Some of what is known about Penda comes from the hostile account of Bede, who disliked him – both as an enemy to Bede's own Northumbria and as a pagan. However, Bede admits that Penda freely allowed Christian missionaries from Lindisfarne into Mercia and did not restrain them from preaching. In 633 Penda and his ally Cadwallon of Gwynedd defeated and killed Edwin, who had become not only ruler of the newly unified Northumbria, but bretwalda, or high king, over the southern kingdoms. When another Northumbrian king, Oswald, arose and again claimed overlordship of the south, he also suffered defeat and death at the hands of Penda and his allies – in 642 at the Battle of Maserfield. In 655, after a period of confusion in Northumbria, Penda brought 30 sub-kings to fight the new Northumbrian king Oswiu at the Battle of Winwaed, in which Penda in turn lost the battle and his life.The battle led to a temporary collapse of Mercian power. Penda's son Peada, who had converted to Christianity at Repton in 653, succeeded his father as king of Mercia; Oswiu set up Peada as an under-king; but in the spring of 656 he was murdered and Oswiu assumed direct control of the whole of Mercia. A Mercian revolt in 658 threw off Northumbrian domination and resulted in the appearance of another son of Penda, Wulfhere, who ruled Mercia as an independent kingdom (though he apparently continued to render tribute to Northumbria for a while) until his death in 675. Wulfhere initially succeeded in restoring the power of Mercia, but the end of his reign saw a serious defeat by Northumbria. The next king, Æthelred, defeated Northumbria in the Battle of the Trent in 679, settling once and for all the long-disputed control of the former kingdom of Lindsey. Æthelred was succeeded by Cœnred, son of Wulfhere; both these kings became better known for their religious activities than anything else, but the king who succeeded them in 709, Ceolred, is said in a letter of Saint Boniface to have been a dissolute youth who died insane. So ended the rule of the direct descendants of Penda.At some point before the accession of Æthelbald in 716 the Mercians conquered the region around Wroxeter, known to the Welsh as Pengwern or as "The Paradise of Powys". Elegies written in the persona of its dispossessed rulers record the sorrow at this loss.
The next important king of Mercia, Æthelbald, reigned from 716 to 757. For the first few years of his reign he had to face two strong rival kings, Wihtred of Kent and Ine of Wessex. But when Wihtred died in 725, and Ine abdicated in 726 to become a monk in Rome, Æthelbald was free to establish Mercia's hegemony over the rest of the Anglo-Saxons south of the Humber. Æthelbald suffered a setback in 752, when the West Saxons under Cuthred defeated him, but he seems to have restored his supremacy over Wessex by 757.In July 2009, the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was discovered by Terry Herbert in a field at Hammerwich, near Brownhills and close to  Lichfield in Staffordshire. Lichfield functioned as the religious centre of Mercia. The artefacts have tentatively been dated by Svante Fischer and Jean Soulat to around AD 600–800. Whether the hoard was deposited by Anglo-Saxon pagans or Christians remains unclear, as does the purpose of the deposit.

Reign of Offa and rise of Wessex
After the murder of Æthelbald by one of his bodyguards in 757, a civil war broke out which concluded with the victory of Offa, a descendant of Pybba. Offa (reigned 757 to 796) had to build anew the hegemony which his predecessor had exercised over the southern English, and he did this so successfully that he became the greatest king Mercia had ever known. Not only did he win battles and dominate Southern England, but also he took an active hand in administering the affairs of his kingdom, founding market towns and overseeing the first major issues of gold coins in Britain; he assumed a role in the administration of the Catholic Church in England (sponsoring the short-lived archbishopric of Lichfield, 787 to 799), and even negotiated with Charlemagne as an equal. Offa is credited with the construction of Offa's Dyke, which marked the border between Wales and Mercia.Offa exerted himself to ensure that his son Ecgfrith of Mercia would succeed him, but after Offa's death in July 796 Ecgfrith survived for only five months, and the kingdom passed to a distant relative named Coenwulf in December 796. In 821 Coenwulf's brother Ceolwulf succeeded to the Mercian kingship; he demonstrated his military prowess by his attack on and destruction of the fortress of Deganwy in Gwynedd. The power of the West Saxons under Egbert (King of Wessex from 802 to 839) grew during this period, however, and in 825 Egbert defeated the Mercian king Beornwulf (who had overthrown Ceolwulf in 823) at Ellendun.The Battle of Ellendun proved decisive. At this point, Mercia lost control of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and possibly also Essex. Beornwulf was slain while suppressing a revolt amongst the East Angles, and his successor, a former ealdorman named Ludeca (reigned 826–827), met the same fate. Another ealdorman, Wiglaf, subsequently ruled for less than two years before Egbert of Wessex drove him out of Mercia. In 830 Wiglaf regained independence for Mercia, but by this time Wessex had clearly become the dominant power in England. Circa 840 Beorhtwulf succeeded Wiglaf.

Arrival of the Danes
In 852, Burgred came to the throne, and with Ethelwulf of Wessex subjugated North Wales. In 868 Danish invaders occupied Nottingham. The Danes drove Burgred from his kingdom in 874 and Ceolwulf II took his place. In 877 the Danes seized the eastern part of Mercia, which became part of the Danelaw. Ceolwulf, the last king of Mercia, left with the western half, reigned until 879. From about 883 until his death in 911 Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians, ruled Mercia under the overlordship of Wessex. Alfred changed his title from 'king of the West Saxons' to 'king of the Anglo-Saxons' to reflect the acceptance of his overlordship of all southern England not under Danish rule. All coins struck in Mercia after the disappearance of Ceolwulf in c. 879 were in the name of the West Saxon king. Æthelred had married Æthelflæd (c. 870 – 12 June 918), daughter of Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871–899), and she assumed power when her husband became ill at some time in the last ten years of his life.After Æthelred's death in 911 Æthelflæd ruled as "Lady of the Mercians", but Alfred's successor as King of the Anglo-Saxons, Edward the Elder (r. 899–924), took control of London and Oxford, which Alfred had placed under Æthelred's control. Æthelflæd and her brother continued Alfred's policy of building fortified burhs, and by 918 they had conquered the southern Danelaw in East Anglia and Danish Mercia.

Loss of independence
When Æthelflæd died in 918, Ælfwynn, her daughter by Æthelred, succeeded as "Second Lady of the Mercians", but within six months Edward had deprived her of all authority in Mercia and taken her to Wessex. Edward was succeeded as king of the Anglo-Saxons by his eldest son Æthelstan (r. 924–939), who had been brought up in Mercia, and he was immediately accepted as king, but not in Wessex until the following year. In 927 he conquered Northumbria and thus became the first king of all England. Mercia briefly regained a political existence separate from Wessex in 955–959, when Edgar became king of Mercia, and again in 1016, when Cnut and Edmund Ironside divided the English kingdom between themselves, with Cnut taking Mercia. Mercia maintained its separate identity as an earldom until the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Mercian Old English
The dialect thrived between the 8th and 13th centuries and was referred to by John Trevisa, writing in 1387:
For men of the est with men of the west, as it were undir the same partie of hevene, acordeth more in sownynge of speche than men of the north with men of the south, therfore it is that Mercii, that beeth men of myddel Engelond, as it were parteners of the endes, understondeth better the side langages, northerne and southerne, than northerne and southerne understondeth either other...
J. R. R. Tolkien is one of many scholars who have studied and promoted the Mercian dialect of Old English, and introduced various Mercian terms into his legendarium – especially in relation to the Kingdom of Rohan, otherwise known as the Mark (a name cognate with Mercia).   The Mercian dialect is the basis of Tolkien's language of Rohan, and a number of its kings are given the same names as monarchs who appear in the Mercian royal genealogy, e.g. Fréawine, Fréaláf and Éomer (see List of kings of the Angles).

Mercian religion
The first kings of Mercia were pagans, and they resisted the encroachment of Christianity longer than other kingdoms in the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.Mercian rulers remained resolutely pagan until the reign of Peada in 656, although this did not prevent them joining coalitions with Christian Welsh rulers to resist Northumbria. The first appearance of Christianity in Mercia, however, had come at least thirty years earlier, following the Battle of Cirencester of 628, when Penda incorporated the formerly West Saxon territories of Hwicce into his kingdom.The conversion of Mercia to Christianity occurred in the latter part of the 7th century, and by the time of Penda's defeat and death, Mercia was largely surrounded by Christian states. Diuma, an Irish monk and one of Oswiu's missionaries, was subsequently ordained a bishop – the first to operate in Mercia. Christianity finally gained a foothold in Mercia when Oswiu supported Peada as sub-king of the Middle Angles, requiring him to marry Oswiu's daughter, Alchflaed, and to accept her religion.Decisive steps to Christianise Mercia were taken by Chad (Latinised by Bede as Ceadda), the fifth bishop to operate in Mercia. This controversial figure was given land by King Wulfhere to build a monastery at Lichfield. Evidence suggests that the Lichfield Gospels were made in Lichfield around 730. As in other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the many small monasteries established by the Mercian kings allowed the political/military and ecclesiastical leadership to consolidate their unity through bonds of kinship.

Subdivisions of Mercia
For knowledge of the internal composition of the Kingdom of Mercia, we must rely on a document of uncertain age (possibly late 7th century), known as the Tribal Hidage – an assessment of the extent (but not the location) of land owned (reckoned in hides), and therefore the military obligations and perhaps taxes due, by each of the Mercian tribes and subject kingdoms by name. This hidage exists in several manuscript versions, some as late as the 14th century. It lists a number of peoples, such as the Hwicce, who have now vanished, except for reminders in various placenames. The major subdivisions of Mercia were as follows:
South MerciansThe Mercians dwelling south of the River Trent. Folk groups within included the Tomsæte around Tamworth and the Pencersæte around Penkridge (roughly corresponding to southern Staffordshire and northern Warwickshire).North MerciansThe Mercians dwelling north of the River Trent (roughly corresponding to eastern Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire).Outer MerciaAn early phase of Mercian expansion, possibly 6th century (roughly corresponding to southern Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire).LindseyOnce a kingdom in its own right, disputed with Northumbria in the 7th century before finally coming under Mercian control (roughly corresponding to the historic riding of Lindsey in Lincolnshire).Middle AnglesA collection of many smaller folk groups under Mercian control from the 7th century, including the Spaldingas around Spalding, the Bilmingas and Wideringas near Stamford, the North Gyrwe and South Gyrwe near Peterborough, the West Wixna, East Wixna, West Wille and East Wille near Ely, the Sweordora, Hurstingas and Gifle near Bedford, the Hicce around Hitchin, the Cilternsæte in the Chilterns and the Feppingas near Thame (roughly corresponding to Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and southern Oxfordshire).HwicceOnce a kingdom in its own right, disputed with Wessex in the 7th century before finally coming under Mercian control. Smaller folk groups within included the Stoppingas around Warwick and the Arosæte near Droitwich (roughly corresponding to Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and southern Warwickshire).MagonsæteA people of the Welsh border, also known as the Westerna, under Mercian control from the 7th century. Smaller folk groups within included the Temersæte near Hereford and the Hahlsæte near Ludlow (roughly corresponding to Herefordshire and southern Shropshire).WreocansæteA people of the Welsh border under Mercian control from the 7th century. Smaller folk groups within included the Rhiwsæte near Wroxeter and the Meresæte near Chester (roughly corresponding to northern Shropshire, Flintshire and Cheshire).PecsæteAn isolated folk group of the Peak District, under Mercian control from the 7th century (roughly corresponding to northern Derbyshire).Land Between Ribble & MerseyA disorganised region under Mercian control from the 7th century (roughly corresponding to Merseyside, Greater Manchester, and Lancashire south of the River Ribble). It was the most northern extent of the kingdom, and at certain times was claimed by Northumbria and Danelaw.Middle SaxonsTaken over from Essex in the 8th century, including London (roughly corresponding to Greater London, Hertfordshire, and Surrey).After Mercia was annexed by Wessex in the early 10th century, the West Saxon rulers divided it into shires modelled after their own system, cutting across traditional Mercian divisions. These shires survived mostly intact until 1974, and even today still largely follow their original boundaries.

Legacy
Modern uses of the name Mercia
The term "midlands" is first recorded (as mydlonde-shiris) in 1475. John Bateman, writing in 1876 or 1883, referred to contemporary Cheshire and Staffordshire landholdings as being in Mercia. The most credible source for the idea of a contemporary Mercia is Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels. The first of these appeared in 1874 and Hardy himself considered it the origin of the conceit of a contemporary Wessex. Bram Stoker set his 1911 novel The Lair of the White Worm in a contemporary Mercia that may have been influenced by Hardy, whose secretary was a friend of Stoker's brother. Although 'Edwardian Mercia' never had the success of 'Victorian Wessex', it was an idea that appealed to the higher echelons of society. In 1908 Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of Birmingham University, wrote to his counterpart at Bristol, welcoming a new university worthy of "...the great Province of Wessex whose higher educational needs it will supply. It will be no rival, but colleague and co-worker with this university, whose province is Mercia...".The British Army has made use of several regional identities in naming larger, amalgamated formations. After the Second World War, the infantry regiments of Cheshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire were organised in the Mercian Brigade (1948–1968). Today, "Mercia" appears in the titles of two regiments, the Mercian Regiment, founded in 2007, which recruits in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Worcestershire, and parts of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, and the Royal Mercian and Lancastrian Yeomanry, founded in 1992 as part of the Territorial Army. In 1967, the police forces of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire were combined into the West Mercia Constabulary, which changed its name to West Mercia Police in 2009.Telephone directories across the Midlands include a large number of commercial and voluntary organisations using "Mercia" in their names, and in 2012 a new football league was formed called the Mercian Regional Football League.Free Radio Coventry & Warwickshire, a commercial radio station, was originally launched in 1980 as Mercia Sound, later becoming Mercia FM.

Symbolism and attributed heraldry
There is no authentic indigenous Mercian heraldic device, as heraldry did not develop in any recognizable form until the High Middle Ages.The saltire as a symbol of Mercia may have been in use since the time of King Offa. By the 13th century, the saltire had become the attributed arms of the Kingdom of Mercia. The arms are blazoned Azure, a saltire Or, meaning a gold (or yellow) saltire on a blue field. The arms were subsequently used by the Abbey of St Albans, founded by King Offa of Mercia. With the dissolution of the Abbey and the incorporation of the borough of St Albans the device was used on the town's corporate seal and was officially recorded as the arms of the town at an heraldic visitation in 1634.The saltire is used as both a flag and a coat of arms. As a flag, it is flown from Tamworth Castle, the ancient seat of the Mercian Kings, to this day. The flag also appears on street signs welcoming people to Tamworth, the "ancient capital of Mercia". It was also flown outside Birmingham Council House during 2009 while the Staffordshire Hoard was on display in the city before being taken to the British Museum in London. The cross has been incorporated into a number of coats of arms of Mercian towns, including Tamworth, Leek and Blaby. It was recognised as the Mercian flag by the Flag Institute in 2014.The silver double-headed eagle surmounted by a golden three-pronged Saxon crown has been used by several units of the British Army as a heraldic device for Mercia since 1958, including the Mercian Regiment. It is derived from the attributed arms of Leofric, Earl of Mercia in the 11th century. It is worth noting, however, that Leofric is sometimes attributed a black, single-headed eagle instead.The wyvern, a type of dragon, came to have a strong association with Mercia in the 19th century. The Midland Railway, which used a white (silver) wyvern sans legs (legless) as its crest, having inherited it from the Leicester and Swannington Railway, asserted that the "wyvern was the standard of the Kingdom of Mercia", and that it was "a quartering in the town arms of Leicester". The symbol appeared on numerous stations and other company buildings in the region, and was worn as a silver badge by all uniformed employees. However, in 1897 the Railway Magazine noted that there appeared "to be no foundation that the wyvern was associated with the Kingdom of Mercia". It has been associated with Leicester since the time of Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster and Leicester (c. 1278–1322), the most powerful lord in the Midlands, who used it as his personal crest, and was recorded in a heraldic visitation of the town in 1619.In Bram Stoker's 1911 novel The Lair of the White Worm, explicitly set in Mercia (see above), the Mercian white wyvern sans legs of the Midland Railway was transformed into a monstrous beast, the eponymous worm of the title. The word "worm" is derived from Old English wyrm and originally referred to a dragon or serpent. "Wyvern" derives from Old Saxon wivere, also meaning serpent, and is etymologically related to viper.The ultimate source for the symbolism of white dragons in England would appear to be Geoffrey of Monmouth's fictional work,  The History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), which recounts an incident in the life of Merlin where a red dragon is seen fighting a white dragon and prevailing. The red dragon was taken to represent the Welsh and their eventual victory over the Anglo-Saxon invaders, symbolised by the white dragon.The philologist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has suggested that the Middle Kingdom in J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham, a story dominated by a dragon, is based on Mercia, the part of England where Tolkien grew up. This dragon, Chrysophylax, though mostly hostile, eventually helps Giles found a realm of his own, the Little Kingdom. Shippey states further that "the Mark", the land of the Riders of Rohan – all of whom have names in the Mercian dialect of Old English – was once the usual term for central England, and it would have been pronounced and written "marc" rather than the West Saxon "mearc" or the Latinized "Mercia".

See also
Lichfield
List of monarchs of Mercia
List of Anglo-Saxon Mercians
Mercian Old English
Mercian Trail
Old English
Repton Abbey
Staffordshire Hoard
Tamworth, Staffordshire
Wessex
Passage 12:
Brimpton
Brimpton is a mostly rural village and civil parish in West Berkshire, England. Brimpton is centred 4.5 miles (7.2 km) ESE of the town of Newbury.

Toponymy
One suggested origin of the name of Brimpton comes from "Brynni's Town"; Brynni was an Anglo-Saxon owner of the land. A more likely explanation is that Brimpton stands on a hill, and the name comes from a Saxo-Celtic version of "Hill Town"; the Celtic word for hill being "bryn". This name was probably coined in reference to the Iron Age settlement.Brimpton has also been recorded as Brinniggetun and Bryningtune (in the 10th century) and Brintone (in the 11th century). More recent alternative names include Brinton, Brimton, Brumton and Brumpton.

Geography
The village occupies a few square miles of land south of the Kennet and Avon Canal and the A4 road, and north of the Enborne which forms the southern then the eastern boundary between slopes of an escarpment where the two parts of the village are concentrated: the nucleus of the village and Brimpton Common.  On a lower slope 0.5 miles (0.80 km) south is Hyde End which has fewer than 12 farmhouses and Victorian cottages. Other villages nearby include Aldermaston and Woolhampton. A newer settlement in the parish, Brimpton Common is on the elevated south bank of the Enborne next to Ashford Hill with Headley in Hampshire. 
The east of the village is part of the Wasing Manor Estate in Wasing and the village has a few outlying farms with a large minority of its land made up of the sloped woods including Inwood Copse, Chaplain's Wood and Hyde End Wood. Two  woods south of the village are managed for timber: Bannister's Wood and Arundell's Copse, the first of these is at the edge of the flood plain of the Enborne.Brimpton Pit is a site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

History
Evidence of Bronze Age inhabitation of Brimpton is in the five round barrows and two bell barrows in the area leading up to the border with Baughurst to the south. Known as "Borson Barrows", the tumuli were referred to in an Anglo-Saxon charter in AD 944. There have also been Iron Age and Roman settlements identified within the parish. The hypocaust of a villa was uncovered in the village, though records of its exact location no longer exist. One possible location is opposite Brimpton House near the parish church. A mediaeval bronze steelyard weight was found in the garden of the old moated house at Brimpton Manor.In the 10th century, 10 hides of land in Brimpton were given to Ordulf (or Ordwulf), a thegn of Edmund I. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists the village as "Brintone", and identifies Robert FitzGerald and Ralph de Mortimer as the lords of the manors of Shalford and Brimpton respectively. It also mentions two churches, three mills, and a dairy.Brimpton was visited by William Cobbett on 30 October 1822 on his way to London; he noted its name as "Brimton", but did not write further about the village. John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870–1872) described Brimpton as "a parish in Newbury district, Berks; on the rivers Emborne and Kennet". Wilson noted that the area of the village measured 1,692 acres (685 ha) and had property to the value of £3,720 (equivalent to £378,674 in 2021). The population was 452, divided amongst 101 homes. He described the position of vicar including vicarage, at that time under the patronage of Rev. G B Caffin, as worth £351. He wrote that the church was "good", with charities of £84. Of its history Wilson noted that a preceptory of the Knights Templar (Shalford Preceptory) was established in Brimpton in the 13th century.  A medieval roll has reference to the Hospitallers as holding land here in 1251 and again in 1275–6, when they are described as of Shalford. In 1302 the king appears to have been the guest of the Knights at Brimpton — his Letters Patent were dated from Shalford manor here 29 November, and the Hospitallers continued to hold this manor till their dissolution in 1540, when it was under the Dissolution of the Monasteries seized and redistributed by Henry VIII.At the centre of the village is the war memorial commemorating the twenty two former residents who died in World War I and two who died in World War II.

Social history
The village relied heavily on agriculture which covers most of the district and employed more than half of the working population in the 19th century.  St. Peter's almshouses for aged married couples and aged widows were erected by Anne Bankes, then Countess of Falmouth, who by her will left £3,000 for their repair, maintenance and inmates' support.  She left almost £667 in the church's trust for the school mistress' salary (combined these are equivalent to £383,584 in 2021). The trust fund, with accumulations, was for many years the most significant in the village and produced an income of almost £80 a year in 1924, when each inmate received a small pension of a fifth of a pound a week, with an extra payment at Christmas and Easter.

Lords of the Manor
Brimpton Manor
At the time of Edward the Confessor, Brimpton Manor was owned by Godwin, Earl of Wessex (Edward's father-in-law). It was later owned by Ralph de Mortimer (at the time of the Domesday Survey) and, subsequently, his son Hugh. Hugh's son, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, succeeded him as lord of the manor, and the ownership passed through the Mortimer of Wigmore family. The manor passed through marriage to the Earldom of March. Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March died childless in the 1420s and the manor was inherited by Richard, Duke of York. After his death in 1460, the manor was owned by his wife Cecily Neville, until its ownership was reverted to the crown on her death.

Shalford Manor
In the Domesday Survey, Shalford Manor was owned by Robert FitzGerald. It had previously been under the ownership of Brictric, a Saxon freeman and thegn to Edward the Confessor. After FitzGerald's death, his estates passed to his brother Gerald, and subsequently to Gerald's son, Roger. On Roger's death, his son – William de Roumare, Earl of Lincoln – inherited the manor. William's son predeceased him, so the manor passed to his grandson – also named William. During this ownership, Simon de Ovile – a tenant of William – granted use of the 3.5 hide estate to the Knights Hospitaller. Letters Patent dated 29 November 1302 show that the Knights hosted Edward I at Shalford.The Knights held the manor until their dissolution in 1540. After this, ownership passed to the crown.In 1544, Henry VIII exchanged the manor with William Wollascott for the manor of Dalehall in Lawford, Essex. Wollascott's son, also named William, purchased the manor of Brimpton in 1595. When he became lord of the manor upon his father's death in 1618, he became owner of both manors.

Demography
The mean age of residents was in 2001: 38.74, and the median was 40.

Religion
There have been at least three churches in Brimpton, two of which are still in use. The main Anglican church is dedicated to St Peter, and is a Grade II listed building. It was built in 1869 in designed in the 14th-century style. The flint building has a tower (with an octagonal shingled spire) and a wooden porch. The roof is tiled. The interior has a chancel, organ chamber, vestry, a nave with three bays and two aisles, and is faced with ashlar. The structural columns are granite. The belfry holds four bells, dating from 1624 to 1842. The oldest bell, the fourth, was recast by Mears and Stainbank in 1876.

The other operational church is Brimpton Baptist Church, which was established in 1843.The chapel of St Leonard, a 14th-century stone building, is located on Manor Farm. It was used as the place of worship of the Shalford Preceptory, a group of Knights Templar (and later Knights Hospitaller) who had formed in the 13th century. By 1614, the chapel had been converted into a barn at Brimpton Court.

Amenities
The village has a charity shop, a pub, The Three Horseshoes, and the village church. There is also a Church of England primary school. Brimpton Airfield, a mile east of the village, has a 620 metres (2,030 ft) grass runway for light aircraft.

Demography

Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: When was the kingdom that Heptarchy was part of abolished?



Answer: 918