Records are unreliable for the next 200 years, but in this time, southern Britain went from being British to being English due to settlement of Germanic tribes such as the Angles and Saxons. Hampshire emerged as the centre of what was to become the most powerful kingdom in Britain, the Kingdom of Wessex. Evidence of early Anglo-Saxon settlement has been found at Clausentum, dated to the fifth century. It has been suggested that Germanic settlement in this region was initially controlled and directed by powerful Romano-British trading ports; however, the incomers eventually appear to have dominated the locals, and by the seventh century, most of the population of Hampshire spoke Old English rather than Brittonic. Around this period, the administrative region of "Hampshire" seems to appear; the name is attested as "Hamtunscir" in 755, and Albany Major suggested that the traditional western and northern borders of Hampshire may even go back to the very earliest conquests of Cerdic, legendary founder of Wessex, at the beginning of the sixth century. Wessex, with its capital at Winchester, gradually expanded westwards into Brythonic Dorset and Somerset in the seventh century. A statue in Winchester celebrates the powerful King Alfred, who repulsed the Vikings and stabilised the region in the 9th century. A scholar as well as a soldier, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a powerful tool in the development of the English identity, was commissioned in his reign. King Alfred proclaimed himself "King of England" in 886; but Athelstan of Wessex did not officially control the whole of England until 927.