CHAP. V. his father's taste for letters; while his younger brother, The House of Ethelweard, mastered both Latin and English in the

Elfred,

901

937.

palace-school,1 Eadward's studies, like those of most of the young nobles, were restricted to books and songs in his own tongue. But he was already famous as a warrior who had rivalled the glory of Ethelred in the storm of the pirate camp on the Colne as well as in the victory of Buttington; and with his father's warlike ardour he inherited his political capacity. Like Elfred he was able to set aside for years the dreams of mere warlike enterprize ; and his earlier reign, though troubled for a while by the revolt of a claimant of his throne, was in the main a time of peace. The failure of their last attack had left the English Danes little minded to quarrel with Wessex, while the strength of their Wiking allies was thrown for some years into the strife on the other side of the Channel, where Hrolf was establishing himself in the valley of the Seine. The peace indeed was far from being unbroken. Ælfred's death had revived the question of the succession; the order established under Æthelwulf by which his sons followed one another to the exclusion of their children was now exhausted; and it can only have been by a decision of the Witenagemot that the children of Ethelwulf's elder sons were set aside, and the royal stock settled in the descendants of

1 "In quâ scholâ utriusque linguæ libri, Latinæ scilicet et Saxonicæ, assidue legebantur." Asser (ed. Wise), p. 43.

2 He and his sister Ælfthryth, who married Count Baldwin, "et psalmos et Saxonicos libros et maxime Saxonica carmina studiose didicere." Ib.

Ælfred, the youngest. That this decision expressed

CHAP. V.

Elfred.

901

937.

the national will was shown at Eadward's accession. The House of When his cousin Ethelwald, king Æthelred's son, rose to claim the crown, he found himself without support and forced to fly from Wessex.' The shelter which he found among the Danes of Northumbria and his acceptance as their king, marks the first step in that union of Danes and Englishmen which was to be the work of the coming century; and the impression of this must have been strengthened when in 905 he moored off the eastern coast and roused the Danes of East-Anglia to follow him in an attack on Wessex. Eadward however anticipated the blow by appearing with an army on the Ouse; and the fall of Æthelwald in a fight with the Kentish division of this force ended the war. The Wedmore Frith was renewed. at Ittingford in 906,3 and Wessex enjoyed four years more of undisturbed tranquillity.*

1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 901.

3 Ibid. a. 906.

2 Ibid. a. 905.

For this period the earlier English Chronicle of Winchester is largely supplemented by a Chronicle drawn up at Worcester (that known as Tiber. B. iv. of the Cotton Collection, and the "D" of Mr. Earle. "Parallel Chron." Intr. xxxix. etc.). What distinguishes this Worcester Chronicle is a large insertion of northern annals, beginning in 737; the earlier of which may be due (Stubbs, Archæol. Journ. No. 75, p. 236, note) to Bishop Werfrith of Worcester, one of Elfred's literary assistants, who sate from 873 to 915. But for Æthelflæd's campaigns we have, inserted, a wholly independent Mercian Chronicle, ending with her death, and equal in fulness of detail to the parallel Winchester Chronicle, which restricts itself to Eadward's exploits and omits those of his sister. There are difficulties indeed in reconciling these accounts chronologically. The death of Æthelflæd is placed in the Mercian Chronicle at 918; in the

CHAP. V.

Elfred.

901937.

King of the Angul

Saxons.

That Eadward's patience however by no means

The House of implied any abandonment of Elfred's policy, above all of his plans for a national union, was shown in a hange of the royal style. With Alfred the connexion of his two realms had remained to the last a purely personal connexion. He had been Mercian king among the Mercians; he had remained WestSaxon king among the men of Wessex. But from the first moment of his reign Eadward showed his resolve to look on the two dominions he ruled as a single realm, and to blend their peoples in some sort into a single people. He is no longer king of the West-Saxons or of the Mercians, but "King of the Angul-Saxons."1 The title is no doubt a transitional one; it represents the effort of the king to look on the Mercian Engle and the Saxon Gewissas as a single folk rather than any actual fusion of the one with the other; we know indeed that the separate life of Mercia under Ethelred and Ethelflæd remained

Winchester Chronicle at 922. The latter is probably the more correct, for we find Leicester, which according to the Mercian Chronicle had submitted to the Lady in 918, still Danish and leading a Danish here against her brother in 921; and as the preceding dates, at any rate from Æthelred's death, are linked in series with this final one, I have ventured to place them also four years later than the year assigned to them by the Worcester chronicler.

1 66

Angul-Saxonum rex" is his common description in the charters of his reign, a description almost confined—as we shall see-to Eadward. See Kemble, Cod. Dip. 333, 335, 1080, 1083, 1084, 1090, 1091, 1092, 1093, 1094, 1095, 1096. In a charter of 901, his first year (Cod. Dip. 1078), his "Angul-Saxonum rex" explains itself by an after phrase, "Omnium judicio sapien tum Gewissorum et Mercensium,"

undisturbed for all the change in the royal style.

CHAP. V.

Elfred.

901937.

But the change was none the less a significant one. The House of If no such people as "the Anglo-Saxons" existed or could be made to exist, the effort to create such a people had its issues in an after time, when not only West-Saxon and Mercian but every man from the Forth to the Channel should be looked on by his king and regard himself as one of an English people.1

Nor did the king's policy of inaction extend to his Mercian realm, for it must have been with his sanction or at his command that the Mercian rulers took at this moment what proved to be a first step in the final struggle with the Danelaw. In the Peace of Wedmore one of the main aims of Elfred had been to cut off the Danelaw from the Welsh ; and he had secured this by retaining all of the older Mid-England westward, as was roughly said, of the Watling Street as a new English Mercia. But in its northern portion the barrier was a weak one; for the extremity of the tract which now formed the Mercian Ealdordom-the northern part, that is, of our modern Cheshire was little more than a strip of land across which the Dane of the Five Boroughs could easily push to call his old allies on the Welsh border to arms. To strengthen this barrier had been

1 It may be well to note that the word "Angul-Saxon" is of purely political coinage, and that no man is ever known, save in our own day, to have called himself "an Anglo-Saxon." The phrase too applied strictly to the Engle of Mercia and the Saxons of Wessex, not to any larger area. For the general use of "Engle" and "Saxon," I must refer my readers to Mr. Freeman's exhaustive treatise, "Norm. Conq." i. App. A.

Chester rebuilt.

CHAP. V.

the purpose of its rulers from the first. At its The House of weakest point lay the ruined city of Chester, to

Ælfred.

901937.

whose military importance the recent harbourage of Hasting within its walls had probably drawn their attention. Commanding as it did the passage over the lower Dee, and the main roads from MidEngland to North-Wales, or from South-England into the wild country which had once been Cumbria, Chester furnished also a port where a fleet could be stationed to hold the mastery of the Irish Channel, and cut off the English Danelaw from the Danes of the Irish coast. Nor was it hard to restore it to its older strength. Ruined and deserted as the town had lain since its surrender to Æthelfrith in 607,1 the military strength of its position was such as could be little harmed by time and neglect. The huge trench which severed the block of sandstone on which it stood from the rest of the higher ground, the massive walls which girt in its site, the marshy level and the river course which formed an outer barrier round them, were still ready to hand; and in their "renewal " of the town 2 in 907 Ealdorman Ethelred and his wife seem to have done little more than give protection to the passage across the Dee, by raising a mound with a stockade or fort on its summit in the low ground beside the bridge, and by extending the older walls in this quarter to the river.

1 It was still a 66 waste chester when Hasting took refuge there. Eng. Chron. a. 894. Flor. Worc. (ed. Thorpe), i. p.

113.

2 This is only recorded in two of the later copies of the Chronicle, Mr. Earle's B. and C. at 907. "Her wæs Ligceaster geedneowad." Flor. Worc. (ed. Thorpe), vol. i. p. 120.