CHAP. 1.

Broken indeed by ceaseless strife Northumbria The was ready to fall before a conqueror's sword. But England of Ecgberht. no such doom seemed to threaten Mercia. In Mercia Mercia. the royal stock went on unchallenged. No civil war disturbed the rule of Offa or of Cenwulf. No foreign ruler dared to threaten the Middle Kingdom as Charles had threatened the North. As the eighth century drew to its close, indeed, Mercia seemed destined rather to absorb its fellow states than to be absorbed by either of them. Northumbria was torn by anarchy. Wessex lay almost hidden from sight behind the forest-screen of the Andredsweald. All that the outer world saw of Britain was the realm of the Mercian kings. From Dover to the Ribble, from Bath to the Humber, the great mass of the island submitted to their sway; and to the Frankish court the lord of this vast domain was already "king of the English." The ability of Offa and Cenwulf as rulers, as well as the length of their reigns, heightened the impression of Mercian strength. But even at the summit of their power, a close observer might have seen the inherent weakness of the structure they had built up. The kingdom in fact was held together simply by the sword. It stretched from sea to sea; but both on the eastern and the western coast its subject-provinces only waited the hour of trial to turn against it. The Welsh of North-Wales were ready to

803; there are two ecclesiastical entries in 830 and 846, then from 849 the chronicle is for some time wholly drawn from southern sources, and without reference to the north. In his "Historia de Dunelmensi Ecclesia" there is a like gap between 793 and 867.

The England of

rise at any moment. Kent, a possession essential to the CHAP. I. communication of Mercia with the western world, had risen against Offa and again risen against Cenwulf. The Ecgberht. East-Anglians were now preparing to renew the strife which they had waged for centuries against the western Engle. And within Mercia itself there seems to have been little of that administrative organization which might have compensated for the hostility of its dependencies. The existence of five great ealdormen seems to point to a perpetuation of the purely local government in the provinces which made up the central realm. It was characteristic indeed of the looseness of its political structure that Mercia had no marked centre of government. Northumbria found a centre at York. Wessex recognised its royal town in Winchester. But Tamworth was simply a royal vill at which the Mercian kings dwelt more frequently than elsewhere. Mercia in fact owed its greatness wholly to the character of its individual kings. A single defeat under Æthelbald had already revealed its inherent weakness; and the same revelation was to follow its later defeat under Beorhtwulf.

Wessex on the other hand, smaller as was its Wessex. area and later as was its developement than that of its fellow-kingdoms, had a vigour and compactness which neither of them possessed. Its military strength was really greater than theirs. From the first moment of their descent upon Britain the Gewissas had seized a region of surpassing military value. The Gwent was a natural fortress, backed by the sea, screened from attack on either side by impassable woodlands, by Selwood and the Andreds weald, and presenting along

CHAP. I. its front two parallel lines of heights, whose steep The escarpments rose like walls in face of any assailants. Ecgberht. Their main settlement, Winchester, lay in the centre

England of

of this region; and a series of roads which diverged
from it carried forces easily to any threatened point
of the border. However Wessex might grow, the
Gwent remained its heart and centre; and the
inaccessibility of the Gwent
of the Gwent was shown by its
security from any inroad till the coming of the Danes.
Northumbrian hosts might pour over Mid-Britain,
or Mercian hosts carry their ravages over North-
umbria, but neither Mercian nor Northumbrian
ever appeared before Winchester. The bulk of the
West-Saxon fights were fought in the district over
Thames; and if invaders threatened the Gwent
itself it was only, like Ceolric, to be thrown back
discomfited from the steeps of Wanborough. Even
Wulfhere after a great victory could penetrate no
further into Wessex than the same steep of Ashdown.
The varied composition of Ecgberht's kingdom, in-
stead of proving a source of weakness, was itself a
source of strength. Its centre was the older Wessex
we have described, the region between the Andreds-
weald and the Selwood; a district of purely English
blood grouped round a single political and religious
centre at Winchester. To the west lay the newer.
Wessex, a tract which indeed found a single ecclesias-
tical centre in Sherborne, but where Welsh and
English blood mingled in the veins of the popula-
tion, and in which the ethnological character varied
from the English element dominant along the skirts
of Selwood to the wholly Celtic life of the western

CHAP. I.

The England of

Dyvnaint. But this newer Wessex was even more West-Saxon in temper than the Wessex of the Gwent. The slowness of its conquest, the gradual settlement Egbert. of the conquerors over its soil, had bound it firmly to the house of Cerdic, and utterly obliterated its Celtic traditions. And besides this, the two portions were knit together by an administrative order which was hardly known elsewhere. Our ignorance of the early history of Wessex leaves us no means of tracing the origin of this order, but in Ecgberht's day at least it was firmly established. Every folkdistrict in the realm was placed in the hands of a single ealdorman, an officer who by this time must have been of royal appointment, and who was above all the leader of its local force or "fyrd." It is through the mention of these officers that we see that Wessex was by this time at any rate parted into the administrative divisions that it still retains, and that the Somer-sætan, the Defn-sætan, and the Dorsætan had their defined districts on one side the Selwood, as the settlers in the "Bearroc-wood," the Wil-sætan, and the original Gewissas in their tract about Hampton had on the other.

The

Wikings

It was this political and administrative superiority, even more than its military vigour, which so sud- and denly set Wessex at the head of the English states England. and gave into its hands the work of consolidating the English peoples. In Ecgberht's day, however, that work had hardly begun. Though every one of its states had submitted to his sway,' Ecgberht had not become a king of England. He had not

1 See "Making of England," cap. viii. (A. S. G.)

The England of

CHAP. I. even become king of the Mercians, of the East Angles, or of the Northumbrians. It was not till Ælfred's Ecgberht day, a hundred years later, that a king of Wessex could call himself also king of the Mercians; it was not till Ethelstan that the ruler who was at once king of the West-Saxons and king of the Mercians could add to his title that of king of the Northumbrians. Even then the bond which united the Three Kingdoms was but the personal bond of their allegiance to the same ruler; and it was not till the close of Eadgar's reign that the genius of Dunstan dared to create an England and to crown the lord of the three realms as its national king. But these things were far off in Ecgberht's time. His conquests had given him a supremacy over his fellow-kings, by which they and their peoples were bound to pay him tribute and to follow him in war. But their life remained in all other matters as independent as before. In spite of submission and tribute Northumbria seems to have remained almost wholly detached from its over-lords. Rival claimants for its throne fought on as of old, unhindered by any interference from the south; and the successors of Ecgberht made not a single effort to rescue it from the Dane. East Anglia remained under its old line of kings, almost as isolated as Northumbria from Wessex, and equally unaided by it in the coming struggle. Mercia itself, broken as it was by defeat after defeat, was far from passing into a mere province of the West-Saxon realm; it retained its old national life as it retained its bounds; and though Ecgberht drove its king Wiglaf from his