The occupation of Somerset by the Saxon invaders was a slow and a comparatively late process. It was relatively little affected by Saxon conquest and influence in the opening phases of Saxon adventum in the fifth and early sixth centuries. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first compiled towards the end of the ninth century, a branch of the West Saxons, known as the Gewissae, made their first settlement in the early part of the sixth century west of the extension of the so-called Jutish territory, in what is now the southern borderland of Hampshire and Wiltshire. They fought the Britons at Cardices Ford (Charford on the Avon) and advanced northwards towards the populated region of Salisbury Plain. The main body of West Saxons, according to archaeological evidence, were, possibly, still in the upper Thames valley in the middle of the sixth century. Then in 577 came the decisive battle at Deorham (Dyrham, just north of Bath) when British rulers were slain and British refugees driven from the ruins of Roman towns at Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath by Ceawlin and his son Cuthwine. The ruins of Bath are thus described in a seventh-century elegiac poem which dwells on earthly mutability, mortality and overshadowing fate: