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Wessex and the

slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the CHAP. III. market-place, as when the English themselves had attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain at the altar Northmen. by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion, government disappeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of three centuries before.

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In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Jarrow Ecgberht. and Holy Island, and the presence of the freebooters soon told on the political balance of the English realms. A great revolution was going on in the south, where Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death while the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht. In Offa's days Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex and had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He remained there through the memorable year during which Charles the Great restored the Empire of the West, and returned. in 802 to be quietly welcomed as King by the WestSaxon people. A march into the heart of Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in the south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia which broke out in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all England south of Thames to the WestSaxons and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength when Ecgberht crossed the Thames in 827, and the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without a struggle to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of supremacy over Mercia alone.

The dream of a union of all England drew him to the north. Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts it stood at the head of the English race; and under a king like Eadberht it would have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood Æthelbald. But the ruin of Jarrow and Holy Island had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn by civil

CHAP. III. strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed to meet the Northmen, Northumbria sought union and deliverance in subjection to a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the supremacy of Wessex.

Wessex and the Northmen. 796947.

With the submission of Northumbria the work which Conquests Oswiu and Æthelbald had failed to do was done, and the of the Northmen, whole English race was for the first time knit together under a single rule. The union came not a moment too soon. Had the old severance of people from people, the old civil strife within each separate realm gone on it is hard to see how the attacks of the Northmen could have been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland, and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Charmouth in Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet them, from the field. His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a little rest for the land; but Ethelwulf who mounted the throne on Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off by years of hard fighting. Ethelwulf fought bravely in defence of his realm; in his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851 he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success won peace for the land through the short and uneventful reigns of his sons Æthelbald and Ethelberht. But the northern storm burst in full force upon England when a third son, Ethelred, followed his brothers on the throne. The Northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland and the coast of Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and from west and east alike they closed upon Britain. While one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on the coast of East Anglia under Hubba and marched the next year upon York. A victory over two claimants of its crown gave the pirates Northumbria; and their two armies united at Nottingham in 868 for an attack on the Mercian realm, Mercia was saved by a march of King Ethelied to Not

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