most powerful kingdom in Britain; but this did not last, for in the year 800 Egbert became king of Wessex, and in his time the chief power passed over to Wessex, and stayed there. of the West Saxons. Egbert, king of the West Saxons, is often called the first king of all England. He was not that, but he was the first A.D. 800. English king who became the head of all the others. Egbert, king Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex he made parts of his own kingdom, their old lines of kings having come to an end. The kings of the East Angles, of the Mercians, of the Northumbrians, and of the Welsh, were subject to him in that way already spoken of, which became so common in those times, that is, they acknowledged him as their over-lord, and promised to do nothing against his interest; but he had no authority over their people, so it cannot be said that he was king of the Northumbrians or of the Welsh, though he was over-lord of the Welsh and Northumbrian kings. But the Strathclyde Welsh, and the Scots and Picts, who had sometimes been subject to the Northumbrian kings, were not in any way subject to Egbert. We know very little of Egbert, but we are told that he spent thirteen years in banishment before he became king, at the court of Charlemagne, the great king of the Franks, who ruled all Gaul and Germany. It is very likely that at his court Egbert's ideas of kingly government were enlarged, and that he came back to England with a distinct purpose to be a more powerful ruler than any English king had been before him. In his time forces began to work which in the end brought all England under the rule of one king, so that the king of the West Saxons became at last the king of all England. Why did Wessex obtain this power, rather than any of the other kingdoms? I have said that in Egbert's time Kent, Surrey, and Sussex were joined to Wessex, so that it included all the south of England. Now the south of England was no doubt the most fertile and the richest part; it lay nearest to the Continent, where the tide of civilisation was flowing fullest. And the people of Wessex settled their Welsh question before Northumbria or Mercia were able to do so; Egbert ravaged Cornwall from east to west, and just before his death he won a great victory over the Cornishmen (835), after which they never shook off the English rule. But the chief reason that Wessex became the cradle of the monarchy of England was that Egbert was followed by a long line of brave and wise kings, a race of heroes, and they alone were able to make head against the sea of troubles in which the other English kingdoms were overwhelmed and sank. We have now come to that crisis in the history of England when she had to fight for her very life with those fierce pirates of the north, who in our old histories are Invasion of called the Danes. These Danes, who came not the Danes. only from Denmark but from Norway also, were a nation of pirates, as fierce and barbarous as the English themselves had been when they came to Britain. They were a people of the same stock as the English, speaking almost the same language. But whereas our forefathers had been Christians for about two hundred years, and had become on the whole a sober respectable people, tilling the land and practising all the arts of civilised life, as civilised life was then, these Danes were heathen, with all the barbarity and brutality of heathen. When they landed they slew all the people they could find, they plundered everything they could lay hold of, and seemed to take a wanton delight in burning whatever they could not carry away. Wherever they went the churches were burnt, the monasteries were sacked, the peaceful monks, who had given their time to labour and study and prayer were driven out or slain, the precious pictures and books which had been brought from Rome or copied in England with so much trouble, were wantonly destroyed, and the work of centuries was undone. When the Danes had got as much booty as they could carry, they went back to their ships and sailed off in triumph, laughing at the English, who could not pursue them, for Englishmen were not then masters of the seas, and the Danes were far the better sailors. Sometimes they seized horses for themselves when they landed, and scoured the country, plundering place after place for a whole summer, then returning with their stolen goods to spend the winter in Denmark. Another common feat of 1 Cornwall appears to have continued for some time to be a separate principality, but subject ecclesiastically and civilly to the church and king of Wessex. In 875 the Annales Cambria record the death of Dumgarth, apparently the last king of Cornwall. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecc. Documents, i. pp. 673, 675. theirs was to sail up some river, robbing, slaying and burning on either bank as they went, and then, if the people of the country had gathered together to fight them on their way back, they dragged their light ships overland to the next river or firth, and then sailed off scot free, for they were as cunning as they were fierce. Danes in umbria, East Mercia. It was thirteen years before Egbert began to reign, in the year 787, that the first ships of the Danes or Northmen came to England. The crews landed on the coast of Dorset, and slew the reeve of Dorchester with all his men, who had come down to see who these strangers might be. After that they came often in the days of Egbert, and oftener still in the days of Ethelwulf his son. When they had harried vade North- England in this way for some seventy or eighty Anglia, and years, plundering in summer and generally returning home for the winter, they began to aim at a more complete conquest of the country. In 866 a formidable army came to England, and gradually overran Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. The two kings of the Northumbrians were slain, and the Northumbrians and Mercians made peace ignominiously with the heathen; the help which Ethelred and Alfred, the sons of Ethelwulf, gave to the Mercians in besieging the Danes in Nottingham seems to have been all in vain. The Danes defeated and slew King Edmund of East Anglia, who was afterwards revered as a saint and martyr by the English, and had the great abbey of St. Edmondsbury built to his honour. Up to the time of this Danish invasion there were still kings of Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia, though we are now in the reigns of the grandsons of Egbert. Wessex was now the last English kingdom which held up its head against the Danes, and it seemed a question whether Wessex would be able to hold up long. For wherever the Danes went they spread panic; the English had become so cowed by their long ravages that they had lost heart. Yet the struggle between Englishmen and Danes was one between Christianity and heathenism, between civilisation and barbarism; and the fate of England hung upon the fate of Wessex. Happily for England, the hour of need brought with it the man who was able to save his country. This man was King Alfred. We must pause awhile to study a life in which the life of the English people was gathered and bound up. DATES. Wessex pushes her frontier to the Severn Kenwalk of Wessex conquers Somerset, driving the Welsh to the Parret Ina, king of Wessex Welsh frontier at Offa's Dyke Offa, king of Mercia, conquers Shropshire, and fixes the First coming of the Danes Egbert king of the West Saxons Ethelwulf. Ethelbald. Ethelbert Ethelred Alfred A.D. 577 (probably) 616 626 658 688 777 787 800 836 857 860 866 871 CHAPTER V. ALFRED was the youngest son of Ethelwulf, king of Wessex. His father is said to have loved him above his other children, and because he loved him so much he sent him to Rome when he was only four years old to be blessed by the Pope. Two years afterwards, when Ethelwulf himself went to Rome, he took the little Alfred with him; and though Alfred was then only six years old, yet as he stayed in Rome a year, no doubt he remembered for the rest of his life the great sights he had seen in Rome, and by such sights his education was begun. His mother was a good and wise woman, of Mercian race. There is a pretty story told that she encouraged her children in the love of the national English poetry by promising a beautifully painted book to the one who should first learn the poems it contained, and that the little Alfred went to his tutor and earned the prize by learning the poems. Much doubt has been thrown on this story, because it is said to have happened when he was twelve years old, and we know that his mother had been dead a long time then. The mistake in the age is no reason for entirely rejecting the story, and we may well believe that Alfred's mother encouraged him in the love of old English songs. But though Alfred learned to read and to write at some period of his life, he used to lament in his manhood that he could not get teachers when he was young and had the leisure and the desire to learn. But Alfred learned riding, hunting, fighting, and the other accomplishments which were thought proper to an Etheling or prince, and became very skilful in them all. He lived from his youth up among wars and rumours of wars; when he was eleven years old the Danes sacked Winchester, the royal city of Wessex, and when he was sixteen they ravaged Kent. His father, Ethelwulf, and his brothers who reigned before him, had a constant struggle to defend their kingdom against these pirates. Before it was Alfred's lot to fight with the Danes he had to win the conquest of himself. It is said that in his youth, in the agony of his struggle with temptation, he cried to God: Give me any suffering, any pain which a man may bear without his life's work being hindered, rather than that I should give way to sin.' And he deemed it an answer to his prayer that from that time to the end of his life he was constantly afflicted with a painful disease, in one form or another, which never left him for more than a short season. The Danes invade Wessex. In the year 871 the great Danish army which had overrun the north, middle, and east of England, invaded Wessex. Alfred's brother, Ethelred, was then king of Wessex. Ethelred was a brave man, and he and his brother Alfred were firm in the defence of their country. The Danes took up their quarters at Reading, which lies on the south bank of the Thames, between that river and the Kennett, which flows into it not much farther down. Part of the Danish forces went out to plunder the country, while the other part set to work to build a dyke from the Thames to the Kennett, so as to make a stronghold for themselves between the dyke and the two rivers. They were attacked in this stronghold by Ethelred and his brother Alfred, but they rushed out with such resistless fury that the English were forced to flee. Four days after a more successful battle was fought at Ashdown, in the Vale Ashdown. of the White Horse, in Berkshire, of which we have a long account. There runs an old Roman road from Reading into Wiltshire, along the top of the chalk downs, Battle of |