ENGLAND scored eight tries against Wales at Ashon Gate to go top of the Six Nations table.
John Mitchell’s side scored four first-half tries through Maud Muir, Zoe Aldcroft, Hannah Botterman and Lark Atkin-Davies in front of a record crowd of 19,705 for a Red Roses game outside of Twickenham.
After the break Ellie Kildunne and Abby Dow scored tries for England before Keira Bevan finally got over for Wales.
Second row Rosie Galligan responded and Kildunne grabbed a brilliant second.
England head coach Mitchell said: “It was a good performance and we worked our way into each half. The variety of the scoring was positive and there is still a lot more growth to come.
“I think we can be more urgent and continue to improve our skillset under pressure. What I liked today is we had pressure for long periods of time and executed very well.
“We want to be quicker and build pressure on teams, we can do that in a number of ways.
“We continue creating competition in the group which is lucky from my point of view and it makes my life difficult for selection.”
England captain Marlie Packer said: “There are a few fix-ups and we will fix them over the week and come out stronger against Scotland.
“Some of our soft errors. The thing is we want to let off the handbrake so those errors are going to come in, but it is how we react to them.
“We knew we wanted to come out here in 20 minutes and execute our game plan. We knew Wales would bring it to us, but we focused on ourselves this week.”
England defence coach Sarah Hunter said: “Wales did have opportunties. Whether they were defending at a setpiece or defending our tryline it was outstanding. As a de
