The England of revolution was near at hand. The most prominent CHAP. I. cause of the break up of the political system of the Three Kingdoms was one that had already told fatally Ecgberht. the lesser kingships. In the earlier life of the English peoples, political individuality found its centre and representative in their royal stocks; and the number of the separate folks was shown in the number of their kings. Kent and Sussex found room for at least two in each realm; East Anglia and Wessex seem at times to have had many; there were separate royal stocks for peoples like the Hecanas and Hwiccas, or the South-Mercians and Middle-Engle. It was only through the extinction or degradation of these kingly families that national union was possible; and it is as a main step in bringing this about that the formation of the larger states during the seventh and eighth centuries is so important in our history. With the gradual extension of the Three Kingdoms the bulk of the smaller kingships disappeared.1 Some kings lingered on for a time as under-kings; some sank into ealdormen, who drew their power from the appointment of the conquering over-lord; some, no doubt, perished altogether with the chances of time and of war.2 But a new period began from the moment that the extinction of the royal stocks told on the Three Kingdoms themselves. 1 Thus the Lindsey kings were extinct before 678, when their land was disputed between Mercia and Northumbria; nor do we hear of any Middle-English king after Peada. The stock of Deira ended with Oswini. The kings of Sussex are not heard of after its conquest by Ecgberht, nor those of Wight after its conquest by Ceadwalla. 2 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 198, &c. CHAP. I. England of Northumbria was no longer the formidable kingdom The which we have seen carrying its arms to the Clyde in Egberht, the days of Eadberht. The withdrawal of that king Northumbria. to a cloister had been the close of its greatness, for after a year's reign his son Oswulf was slain by the thegns of his household, and with his death peace and order seem to have come utterly to an end. Oswulf was in fact the last undisputed representative of the royal line of Bernicia. The kingly house fell with him, and from this moment a strife for the crown. absorbed the whole energy of Northumbria. The throne was seized by Æthelwold Moll; 2 and a victory over his opponents at the Eildon Hills near Melrose so strengthened his power that Offa, just settled in Mercia, gave him his daughter to wife. But after six years of rule Ethelwold Moll lost his kingdom in a fight at Winchanheale in 765;3 and his place was taken by another claimant, Alchred.4 The history of Northumbria became from this hour a mere strife between these rivals and their houses. Alchred, victorious over two risings under ealdormen,5 was driven in 774 to take refuge among the Picts by Ethelred, the son of Ethelwold; but after four years of strife Ethelred followed his rival into exile; and his successor, Alfwold "the son of Oswulf" interrupts for nine years, from 779 to 788, the rule of the warring houses. Alfwold's reign 1 "Occisus. . . . â suâ familiâ," Sim. Durh. Gest. Reg. a. 758. 2 Sim. Durh. Gest. Reg. a. 759. 3 Sim. Durh. G. R. a. 765. 4 Alchred claimed descent from Ida through Bleacmann. Flor. Worc. a. 765; but Simeon adds "ut quidam dicunt." Gest. Reg. a. 765. Æthelwold's descent was even more doubtful: "of uncertain descent." 5 Sim Durh. Gest. Reg. a. 774. however was as stormy as the rest. In one rising an ealdorman was "burnt" by two of his fellow-ealdormen; and in 788 another ealdorman rose and slew the king.1 With his slaying the two houses again came to the front; for two years Alchred's son, Osred, occupied the throne; and on his flight 2 in face of a revolt of his ealdormen, the son of Ethelwold Moll, Ethelred, was again recalled to the kingdom after eleven years of exile. Æthelred shrank from no blood-shedding to secure his throne. The two children of his predecessor were drawn by false oaths from their sanctuary at York to be slain at his bidding, and Osred, who was drawn by like pledges from Man, found a like doom. For a while this ruthlessness seems to have succeeded in producing some sort of peace, but the long anarchy of thirty years had left the land a mere chaos of bloodshed and misrule, and all that saved it from utter ruin was the wide extension of its ecclesiastical domains. The waste and bloodshed of its civil wars stopped short at the bounds of the vast possessions which had been granted to its churches; the privilege of sanctuary which they enjoyed gave shelter to the victims of the strife; and the learning and culture of Bæda and of Archbishop Ecgberht still found untroubled homes at Jarrow or York. Its intellectual life was thus able to go on amidst the wreck of its political life; and in the midst of the anarchy a scholar passed from the schools of Northumbria to become the literary centre of the west. Born about 2 Sim. Durh. G. R. a. 792. 1 Sim. Durh. Gest. Reg. a. 788. 3 Sim. Durh. Gest. Reg. a, 792. CHAP. I. The England of Ecgberht. Alcuin. CHAP. I. 735 within the walls of York, Alcuin had reached The early manhood at the retirement of Eadberht from Ecgberht, the throne.1 He had been entrusted, like other noble England of Northumbria and the Wikings. 2 youths, to Archbishop Ecgberht in his boyhood; and It was on his return from a journey to get the pallium for Æthelberht's successor in 781 that Alcuin, now the most famous of European scholars, met Charles the Great at Parma, and was drawn by him. from his work in Britain to the wider work of spreading intellectual life among the Franks. But 1 For Alcuin, see article on him by Stubbs in "Dict. Christ. Biogr." vol. i. p. 73. 2Eo tempore in Eboraica civitate famosus merito scholam magister Alchuinus tenebat, undecumque ad se confluentibus de magna sua scientia communicans." Vit. S. Liudgeri, quoted by Lingard, "Anglo-Saxon Church," vol. ii. p. 203. England of though his home was now in a strange land, Alcuin's CHAP. I. heart still clave to his own Northumbria. The The news of its fresh disorder, and the slaying of Alfwold Eegberht in 788, drew from him prayer after prayer to Charles for leave to revisit his country; and in 790, soon after the recall of Ethelred Moll to the throne, he seems to have returned to the north of Britain. If so, he 1 must have witnessed the bloody deeds by which Ethelred strove to secure his crown; and we cannot wonder at his finding omens of ill in "that rain of blood which," as he wrote after his departure to the king, "we saw in Lent, at a time when the sky was calm and cloudless, fall from the lofty roof of the northern aisle of the church in York." But he could hardly have dreamt how fatally the omen was to be fulfilled by the first descent of the northmen only a few months after his return to Gaul. Their incursion again roused civil strife. In the spring of 796 king Æthelred was slain, and whatever was now the connexion of the Northumbrian with the Frankish court, the wrath of Charles against a race whom he denounced as "murderers of their lords" was hardly allayed by Alcuin's intercession. All cause of intervention however was removed by the accession of Eardwulf, who succeeded in restoring order for the next ten years; but with the death of Eardwulf in 806 the northern kingdom vanishes from history till its submission to Ecgberht seventeen years later.* 1 Alc. Op. (Migne), pt. i. epist. xiii. 2 2 Haddan and Stubbs "Councils," iii. 498. 3 Sim. Durh. "Gest. Reg." a. 796. 4 In his Gesta Regum, Simeon of Durham practically ceases at |