[1] Under the year 508, a date which is not to be relied upon,[2] the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that Cerdic and Cynric "killed a certain British king named Natanleod, and 5 thousand men with him – after whom the land as far as Cerdic's ford was named Natanleaga".
[3] Cerdic's ford is identified with North Charford and South Charford in modern Hampshire and Natanleaga with a marshy area, Netley Marsh, close to the town of Totton in Hampshire.
[4][5] Natanleaga, however, probably does not preserve the name of a defeated British king, but is instead derived from the Old English element næt ("wet") (in its weak oblique form natan).
Similar folk etymologies are believed to have produced the Jutish king Wihtgar, Port, the supposed eponym of Portsmouth, and others.
Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, refers to this identification with scepticism: "By the unanimous, though doubtful, conjecture of our antiquarians, Ambrosius is confounded with Natanleod, who lost his own life and five thousand of his subjects in a battle against Cerdic, the West Saxon."