his comrades, warriors bound personally to him by their free choice, sworn to fight for him to the death, and avenge his cause as their own. When Cynewulf of Wessex was foully slain at Merton his comrades "ran at once to the spot, each as he was ready and as fast as he could," and despising all offers of life, fell fighting over the corpse of their lord. The fidelity of the war-band was rewarded with grants from the royal domain; the king became their lord or hlaford, "the dispenser of gifts;" the comrade became his "servant" or thegn. Personal service at his court was held not to degrade but to ennoble. "Cup-thegn," and "horse-thegn," and "hordere," or treasurer, became great officers of state. The thegn advanced with the advance of the king. He absorbed every post of honor; he became ealdorman, reeve, bishop, judge; while his wealth increased as the common folkland passed into the hands of the king, and was carved out by him into estates for his dependents.

The principle of personal allegiance embodied in the new nobility tended to widen into a theory of general dependence. From Ælfred's day it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The ravages and the long insecurity of the Danish wars aided to drive the free farmer to seek protection from the thegn. His freehold was surrendered to be received back as a fief, laden with service to its lord. Gradually the "lordless man" became a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free churl sank into the villein, and changed from the freeholder who knew no superior but God and the law, to the tenant bound to do service to his lord, to follow him to the field, to look to his court for justice, and render days of service in his demesne. While he lost his older freedom he gradually lost, too, his share in the government of the state. The life of the earlier English state was gathered up in its folk-moot. There, through its representatives chosen in every hundred-moot, the folk had exercised its own sovereignty in matters of justice as of peace and war; while beside the folk-moot, and acting with it, had stood the Witenagemot, the group of "wise men gathered to give rede to the king and through him to propose a course of action to the folk. The preliminary discussion. rested with the nobler sort, the final decision with all. The clash of arms, the "Yea " or "Nay" of the crowd, were its vote. But when by the union of the lesser realms the folk sank

into a portion of a wider state, the folk-moot sank with it; political supremacy passed to the court of the far-off lord, and the influence of the people on government came to an end. Nobles indeed could still gather round the king; and while the folkmoot passes out of political notice, the Witenagemot is heard. of more and more as a royal council. It shared in the higher justice, the imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the control of war, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great officers of state. There were times when it even claimed to elect or depose the king. But with these powers the bulk of the nobles had really less and less to do. The larger the kingdom the greater grew the distance from their homes; and their share in the general deliberations of the realm dwindled to nothing. Practically the national council shrank into a gathering of the great officers of Church and State with the royal thegns, and the old English democracy passed into an oligarchy of the closest kind. The only relic of the popular character of English government lay at last in the ring of citizens who at London or Winchester gathered round the wise men and shouted their "Aye" or "Nay" at the election of a king.

It is in the degradation of the class in which its true strength lay that we must look for the cause of the ruin which already hung over the West-Saxon realm. Eadgar was but thirty-two when he died in 975; and the children he left were mere boys. His death opened the way for bitter political strife among the nobles of his court, whose quarrel took the form of a dispute over the succession. Civil war was, in fact, only averted by the energy of the primate; seizing his cross, he settled the question of Eadgar's successor by the coronation of his son Eadward, and confronted his enemies successfully in two assemblies of the Wise Men. In that of Calne the floor of the room gave way, and according to monkish tradition Dunstan and his friends alone remained unhurt. But not even the fame of a miracle sufficed to turn the tide. The assassination of Eadward was followed by the triumph of Dunstan's opponents, who broke out in "great joy" at the coronation of Eadward's brother Ethelred, a child of ten years old. The government of the realm passed into the hands of the great nobles who upheld Ethelred, and Dunstan withdrew powerless to Canterbury, where he died nine years later.

During the eleven years from 979 to 990, when the young king reached manhood, there is scarcely any internal history to record. New danger however threatened from abroad. The North was girding itself for a fresh onset on England. The Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into their kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and it was no longer in isolated bands but in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests in the South. The seas were again thronged with northern freebooters, and pirate fleets, as of old, appeared on the English coast. In 991 came the first burst of the storm, when a body of Norwegian Wikings landed, and utterly defeated the host of East Anglia on the field of Maldon. In the next year Æthelred was forced to buy a truce from the invaders and to suffer them to settle in the land; while he strengthened himself by a treaty of alliance with Normandy, which was now growing into a great power over sea. A fresh attempt to expel the invaders only proved the signal for the gathering of pirate-hosts such as England had never seen before, under Swein and Olaf, claimants to the Danish and Norwegian thrones. Their withdrawal in 995 was followed by fresh attacks in 997; danger threatened from Normans and from Ostmen, with Wikings from Man, and northmen from Cumberland; while the utter weakness of the realm was shown by Ethelred's taking into his service Danish mercenaries, who seem to have been quartered through Wessex as a defence against their brethren. Threatened with a new attack by Swein, who was now king, not only of Denmark, but by the defeat and death of Olaf, of Norway itself, Æthelred bound Normandy to his side by a marriage with its duke's sister Emma. But a sudden panic betrayed him into an act of basest treachery which ruined his plans of defence at home. Urged by secret orders from the king, the West-Saxons rose on St. Brice's day and pitilessly massacred the Danes scattered among them. Gunhild, the sister of their king Swein, a Christian convert, and one of the hostages for the peace, saw husband and child butchered before her eyes ere she fell threatening vengeance on her murderers. Swein swore at the news to wrest England from Æthelred. For four years he marched through the length and breadth of southern and eastern England, "lighting his war-beacons as he went" in blazing homestead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare for

a later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from Wessex the war extended over East Anglia and Mercia. Canterbury was taken and sacked, Elfheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there in default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set him in the midst of their husting, pelting him with stones and ox-horns, till one more pitiful than the rest clave his skull with an axe.

But a yet more terrible attack was preparing under Swein in the North, and in 1013 his fleet entered the Humber, and called on the Danelaw to rise in his aid. Northumbria, East Anglia, the Five Boroughs, all England north of Watling Street, submitted to him at Gainsborough. Ethelred shrank into a King of Wessex, and of a Wessex helpless before the foe. Resistance was impossible. The war was terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried, churches plundered, men slaughtered. But with the one exception of London, there was no attempt at defence. Oxford and Winchester flung open their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the northmen at Bath. Even London was forced at last to give way, and Ethelred fled over sea to a refuge in Normandy. With the flight of the king ended the long struggle of Wessex for supremacy over Britain. The task which had baffled the energies of Eadwine and Offa, and had proved too hard for the valor of Eadward and the statesmanship of Dunstan, the task of uniting England finally into a single nation, was now to pass to other hands.

B

CHAPTER II.

ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 1013-1204.

Section I.-The Danish Kings.*

RITAIN had become England in the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political order. But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors in a single nation had failed. The effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex. Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than local independence rose again at the call of the Danes. The tide of supremacy rolled in fact backwards and forwards; now the South won lordship over the North, now the North won lordship over the South. But whatever titles kings might assume, or however imposing their rule might appear, Northumbrian remained apart from West-Saxon, Dane from Eng

*Authorities. We are still aided by the collections of royal laws and charters. The English Chronicle is here of great importance; its various copies differ much in tone, &c., from one another, and may to some extent be regarded as distinct works. Florence of Worcester is probably the translator of a valuable copy of the Chronicle which has disappeared. For the reign of Cnut see Green's "Conquest of England." The authority of the contemporary biographer of Eadward (in Luard's "Lives of Eadward the Confessor," published by the Master of the Rolls) is "primary," says Mr. Freeman, "for all matter strictly personal to the King and the whole family of Godwine. He is, however, very distinctly not an historian, but a biographer, sometimes a laureate.' All modern accounts of this reign have been superseded by the elaborate history of Mr. Freeman (“ Norman Conquest," vol. ii.). For the Danish kings and the House of Godwine, see the "Conquest of England," by Mr. Green.