The years since Ecgberht's flight had made little change in the state of Britain. Offa's completion of his kingdom by the seizure of East Anglia had been followed by his death in 796; and under his successor Cenwulf the Mercian archbishopric was suppressed, and there was no attempt to carry further the supremacy of the Midland kingdom. Cenwulf stood silently by when Ecgberht mounted the West-Saxon throne, and maintained peace with the new ruler of Wessex throughout his reign. The first enterprise of Ecgberht indeed was not directed against his English but his Welsh neighbors. In 815 he marched into the heart of Cornwall, and after eight years of fighting, the last fragment of British dominion in the west came to an end. As a nation Britain had passed away with the victories of Deorham and Chester; of the separate British peoples who had still carried on the struggle with the three English kingdoms, the Britons of Cumbria and of Strathclyde had already bowed to Northumbrian rule; the Britons of Wales had owned by tribute to Offa the supremacy of Mercia; the last unconquered British state of West Wales as far as the Land's End now passed under the mastery of Wessex.

While Wessex was regaining the strength it had so long lost, its rival in Mid-Britain was sinking into helpless anarchy. Within, Mercia was torn by a civil war which broke out on Cenwulf's death in 821; and the weakness which this left behind was seen when the old strife with Wessex was renewed by his successor Beornwulf, who in 825 penetrated into Wiltshire, and was defeated in a bloody battle at Ellandun. All England south of the Thames at once submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex, and East Anglia rose in a desperate revolt which proved fatal to its Mercian rulers. Two of its kings in succession fell fighting on East-Anglian soil; and a third, Wiglaf, had hardly mounted the Mercian throne when his exhausted kingdom was called on again to encounter the West-Saxon. Ecgberht saw that the hour had come for a decisive onset. In 828 his army marched northward without a struggle; Wiglaf fled helplessly before it; and Mercia bowed to the West-Saxon overlordship. From Mercia Ecgberht marched on Northumbria; but half a century of anarchy had robbed that kingdom of all vigor, and pirates were already harrying its coast; its nobles met him at Dore in Derbyshire, and owned him as their overlord. The work that Oswiu and Ethelbald

had failed to do was done, and the whole English race in Britain was for the first time knit together under a single ruler. Long and bitter as the struggle for independence was still to be in Mercia and in the north, yet from the moment that Northumbria bowed to its West-Saxon overlord, England was made in fact if not as yet in name.

Section V.-Wessex and the Danes, 802-880.*

The effort after a national sovereignty had hardly been begun, when the Dane struck down the short-lived greatness of Wessex. While Britain was passing through her ages of conquest and settlement, the dwellers in the Scandinavian peninsula and the isles of the Baltic had lain hidden from Christendom, waging their battle for existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, and stormy seas. Forays and plunderraids over sea eked out their scanty livelihood, and as the eighth century closed, these raids found a wider sphere than the waters of the north. Ecgberht had not yet brought all Britain under his sway when the Wikings or "creek-men," as the adventurers were called, were seen hovering off the English coast, and growing in numbers and hardihood as they crept southward to the Thames. The first sight of the northmen is as if the hand on the dial of history had gone back three hundred years. The Norwegian fiords, the Frisian sandbanks, poured forth pirate fleets such as had swept the seas in the days of Hengest and Cerdic. There was the same wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck inland along the riverreaches, or moored around the river islets, the same sights

* Authorities. Our history here rests mainly on the English (or Anglo-Saxon) Chronicle. The earlier part of this is a compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the conquest of South Britain, (2) Short notices of the kings and bishops of Wessex, expanded into larger form by copious insertions from Bæda, and after his death by briefer additions from some northern sources. (3) It is probable that these materials were thrown together, and perhaps translated from Latin into English, in Elfred's time, as a preface to the far fuller annals which begin with the reign of Ethelwulf, and widen into a great contemporary history when they reach that of Elfred himself. Of their character and import as a part of English literature, I have spoken in the text. The "Life of Elfred" which bears the name of Asser is probably contemporary, or at any rate founded on contemporary authority. There is an admirable modern life of the king by Dr. Pauli. For the Danish wars, see “The Conquest of England" by J. R. Green.

of horror, firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as when the English invaders attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, art, religion, government disappeared before these northmen as before the northmen of old. But when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still remained England; the conquerors sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between Briton and different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishman and Welshman. The life of these northern folk was in the main the life of the earlier Englishmen. Their customs, their religion, their social order were the same; they were in fact kinsmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and so complete.

Britain had to meet a double attack from its new assailants. The northmen of Norway had struck westward to the Shetlands and Orkneys, and passed thence by the Hebrides to Ireland; while their kinsmen who now dwelt in the old Engleland steered along the coasts of Frisia and Gaul. Shut in between the two lines of their advance, Britain lay in the very centre of their field of operations; and at the close of Ecgberht's reign, when the decisive struggle first began, their attacks were directed to the two extremities of the WestSaxon realm. After having harried East Anglia and slain in Kent, they swept up the Thames to the plunder of London; while the pirates in the Irish Channel roused all Cornwall to revolt. It was in the alliance of the northmen with the Britons that the danger of these earlier inroads lay. Ecgberht indeed defeated the united forces of these two enemies in a victory at Hengest-dun, but an unequal struggle was carried on for years to come in the Wessex west of Selwood. King Ethelwulf, who followed Ecgberht in 839, fought strenuously in

the defence of his realm; in the defeat of Charmouth, as in the victory at Aclea, he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and he drove back the Welsh of North Wales, who were encouraged by the invaders to rise in arms. Northmen and Welshmen were beaten again and again, and yet the peril grew greater year by year. The dangers to the Christian faith from these heathen assailants roused the clergy to his aid. Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, became Ethelwulf's minister; Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherborne, was among the soldiers of the Cross, and with the ealdormen led the fyrds of Somerset and Dorset to drive the invaders from the mouth of the Parret. At last hard fighting gained the realm a little respite; in 858 Æthelwulf died in peace, and for eight years the Northmen left the land in quiet. But these earlier forays had been mere preludes to the real burst of the storm. When it broke in its full force upon the island, it was no longer a series of plunder-raids, but the invasion of Britain by a host of conquerors who settled as they conquered. The work was now taken up by another people of Scandinavian blood, the Danes. At the accession of Ethelred, the third of Ethelwulf's sons, who had mounted the throne after the short reigns of his brothers, these new assailants fell on Britain. As they came to the front, the character of the attack wholly changed. The petty squadrons which had till now harassed the coast of Britain made way for larger hosts than had as yet fallen on any country in the west; while raid and foray were replaced by the regular campaign of armies who marched to conquer, and whose aim was to settle on the land they won. In 866 the Danes landed in East Anglia, and marched in the next spring across the Humber upon York. Civil strife as usual distracted the energies of Northumbria. Its subjectcrown was disputed by two claimants, and when they united to meet this common danger both fell in the same defeat before the walls of their capital. Northumbria at once submitted to the Danes, and Mercia was only saved by a hasty march of King Ethelred to its aid. But the Peace of Nottingham, by which Ethelred rescued Mercia in 868, left the Danes free to turn to the rich spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough, Crowland, Ely, went up in flames, and their monks fled or were slain among the ruins. From thence they struck suddenly for East Anglia itself, whose king, Eadmund, brought

prisoner before the Danish leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen made him the St. Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the eastern coast, and the stately abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his relics. With Eadmund ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only conquered, but ten years later it was divided among the soldiers of a Danish host, whose leader, Guthrum, assumed its crown. How great was the terror stirred by these successive victories was shown in the action of Mercia, which, though it was as yet still spared from actual conquest, crouched in terror before the Danes, acknowledged them in 870 as its overlords, and paid them tribute.

In four years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and England north of the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a conquest as the Danish conquests of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia, had only been made possible by the temper of these kingdoms themselves. To them the conquest was simply their transfer from one overlord to another, and it would seem as if they preferred the lordship of the Dane to the overlordship of the West-Saxon. It was another sign of the enormous difficulty of welding these kingdoms together into a single people. The time had now come for Wessex to fight, not for supremacy, but for life. As yet is seemed paralyzed by terror. With the exception of his one march on Nottingham, King Ethelred had done. nothing to save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the Danes no sooner pushed up Thames to Reading than the West-Saxons, attacked on their own soil, turned fiercely at bay. The enemy penetrated indeed into the heart of Wessex as far as the heights that overlook the Vale of White Horse. A desperate battle drove them back from Ashdown; but their camp in the tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames proved impregnable, and fresh forces pushed up the Thames to join their fellows. In the midst of the struggle Æthelred died, and left his youngest brother Ælfred to meet a fresh advance of the foe. They had already encamped at Wilton before the young king could meet them, and a series of defeats forced him to buy the withdrawal of the pirates and win a few years' breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the