Armagh, levied tribute from all the north of Ireland.

CHAP. II.

of the Wikings.

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What must have given its main import to this The Coming settlement in Ecgberht's eyes was the fact that it brought with it a revival of the struggle with the Welsh. His conquest of Cornwall had seemed the last blow in a strife of more than four hundred years; but the blow was hardly struck when the action of the northmen in the Irish seas roused the WestWelsh to fresh hopes of freedom. The scanty traces. of their presence show that the pirates attempted little in the way of settlement on the eastern shores of the Irish Channel; there was little indeed to tempt them in the wild Bret-land. But behind it lay the richer land of the Engle; and soon it was not as foes but as friends that they were offering themselves to the Welsh for a raid on their common enemy. Such an offer could not fail to find a response; and thus after encountering with varied fortunes the first stray descents upon his coasts, the West-Saxon king found himself face to face with a rising of the newly-won land across the Tamar,1 backed by armed aid from the northmen. All Cornwall must have risen; for it was at a spot but a few miles from its border that Ecgberht met the forces of the league, on a lift of dreary granitic upland just westward of its boundary, the Tamar, the heights that bear the name of Hengestdun. But victory was still true to the to the king; Cornwall was again recovered; and the fight won rest for his own West-Saxon land from the northern

1 Cornwall had been conquered by Ecgberht in 823. See "Making of England," p. 432. (A.S.G.)

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marauders through the last two years of Ecgberht's reign.1

1

But if the pirate descents failed to loose Ecgberht's hold upon the west, they had a far more momentous Political result in arresting at its very outset his work of organization consolidating the English peoples themselves. This of Wessex. work, it must be remembered, had hardly begun. That the vague supremacy which Ecgberht claimed might have been developed into a real national sovereignty by after efforts of the West-Saxon kings is indeed likely enough, if we compare the real strength of Wessex with that of its rival states. But with the coming of the Danes all effort after such a sovereignty was suddenly brought to an end; and the energy of Wessex had from that moment to be concentrated on the task of selfdefence. We have seen the strength which Ecgberht's kingdom drew from the physical characteristics and varied composition of the older and the newer Wessex that lay on either side of Selwood. But the power

66

1 Eng. Chron. a. 835-(7). In our own English chronicles "Dena or Dane is used as the common term for all the Scandinavian invaders of Britain, though not including the Swedes, who took no part in the attack, while Northman generally means man of Norway." Asser however uses the words as synonymous, Nordmanni sive Dani." Across the channel "Northman was the general name for the pirates, and "Dane' would usually mean a pirate from Denmark. The distinction however is partly a chronological one; as, owing to the late appearance of the Danes in the middle of the ninth century, and the prominent part they then took in the general Wiking movement, their name tended from that time to narrow the area of the earlier term of "Nordmanni." See Munch, "Det Norske Folks Historie" (Germ. trans.), pt. iv. pp. 135-137.

of the West-Saxon ruler stretched beyond the bounds of Wessex, where eastward of the Andreds weald the so-called "Eastern Kingdom" grouped itself round the centre of Kent. Subject as it was to Ecgberht, Kent still retained something of its older greatness; and the existence of the Primate alone would have hindered it from sinking into a mere dependency of Wessex. Nor did it look upon itself as a conquered country or as linked to Wessex simply by the sword; for Ecgberht claimed to be nearest in blood to the house of Hengest, and to be thus as fully hereditary king of Kent as he was of Wessex. The two kingdoms therefore were united, not by a subordination of one to the other, but by their obedience to a common king. Such a relation made it possible to solve the problem of the government of Kent by setting over it as under-king the elder among the sons of the king of Wessex, and by grouping about it Essex, Surrey, and Sussex, to form a realm which bore the name of the Eastern Kingdom.1

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Differences so marked as those which existed be- Its military organization. tween the three divisions of Wessex might well have imperilled its political unity; what they actually did was to triple its military strength. We shall see the Danes conquering Northumbria or Mercia in a single campaign. But to conquer Wessex required a threefold effort. When the pirates, after years of ravage, had practically torn from it the Eastern

1 Charter of Ecgberht, 823; "filii nostri Æthelwulfi, quem regem constituimus in Cantiâ" (Thorpe, "Diplomatarium," p. 66). Æthelwulf's own charter to Chertsey (ib. p. 78) shows that Kent here means the whole Eastern Kingdom.

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Position of the Church.

Kingdom, Wessex itself faced the invaders behind the Andreds weald; and even when the older realm had at last been overrun, a West-Saxon king could still fall back on the Wessex beyond Selwood. And to this natural strength was added the strength of a distinct military organization. The fyrd of each folk-district was placed in the hands of an ealdorman appointed by the king; nor was this arrangement confined to Wessex itself, for in each part of the "Eastern Kingdom" also we find an ealdorman acting side by side with the under-king. The military value of this organization was soon seen in the freedom and elasticity which it gave to the later resistance against the Danes.

But Ecgberht was far from relying only on his warlike resources. In his attitude towards the Church he followed no doubt the example of the Frankish kings. From the earlier Pippin to Charles the Great the rulers of the Franks had striven to raise the social and political importance of the clergy. Within their older dominions they looked upon prelate and priest as the main elements of social order and intellectual progress; in their newer conquests they planted religious foundations as centres. of a new civilization. Motives of hardly less weight would in any case have forced the same policy on Ecgberht. In the realms which his sword had begun to build up into a new England the Church was the one power which he found unbroken. The anarchy of each kingdom within itself, the strife of one kingdom with another, had only served to give the

1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 853.

priesthood a new political weight. In countries where the German invaders found Christianity already established, and bowed to its supremacy, the bishop, enthroned in his Roman town and representing the Roman population in its attitude towards the conqueror, had from the first taken a separate political position which strengthened into temporal princedom as time went on. But great as such a position seemed, it in fact brought him to the level of the secular nobles about him. Like them he became necessarily embroiled in civil strife; like them he was the sport of ill-fortune as of good; and ill-fortune meant in his case, as in theirs, exile or deposition or death. But an English bishop was from the first one in blood and interest with the whole of his English flock. His diocese was the kingdom. His bishop's seat was the king's town. He sate beside king or ealdorman in folkmoot or witenagemot. His position was as national as theirs ; but it had in it an element of permanence which their position lacked. At the close of the eighth century, while kings were being set aside and ealdormen slain, the bishop, drawn by no personal interest into the strife of warring factions, rested unharmed in his bishop's chair. In realms like Kent, where the civil organization broke utterly down, its ruin only added fresh greatness to the spiritual organization beside it. The weakness of the later kings of Hengest's race, their wreck in the struggle of Wessex and Mercia for the Kentish kingdom, raised the Archbishops of Canterbury into a power with which rulers like Offa and Cenwulf were forced to reckon.

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899.