greed, fleet after fleet poured along the coast of Gaul. CHAP. II. The Coming of the Wikings 829 858. Kent. It may have been the very success of their work, They attack however, on the one side of the Channel that had hindered them as yet from undertaking any very serious work on the other. From the outset of Æthelwulf's reign, indeed, their presence had been felt on the eastern coast of Britain; in 838 we hear of descents on Lindsey and East Anglia; and in spite of the silence of our annals these descents were probably often repeated through the years that followed. On Kent naturally their attacks fell more frequently. Nowhere in Britain was there a more tempting field for the spoiler. Its early civilization, its importance as the road of communication with the Continent, made Kent one of the wealthiest and most thriving parts of Britain; its bounds were steadily enlarging as the Kentishmen cleared their way into the skirts of the Weald, and rescued from 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch), a. 838. CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829858. the woodland the fertile tract along the upper MedThe Coming way; and if the silting up of the Wantsum had closed the harbour of Richborough, the growing trade with Gaul had but passed to Dover and to Sandwich.1 The central borough of Kent, Canterbury, was in size and wealth among the greatest of English cities; and it was the seat of a Primacy which the suppression of that of Lichfield left without a rival in southern Britain. What was yet more important in the pirates' eyes was the wealth of its religious houses. Half Thanet belonged to the abbey at Minster; while the estates of the two monasteries at Canterbury were scattered over the whole face of the shire. The victory at Aclea. 2 While Ethelwulf guarded Wessex, it was here that his son Æthelstan met the assailants of his kingdom in the east. In 838 the same force which ravaged Lindsey and East Anglia slew ealdorman Herebriht and many with him in a descent on the flats of the Mersc-wara, and harried and slew in Kent itself. In the next year, after a raid on Canterbury, the pirates pushed up the Thames to London and Rochester." Then for a while the land had rest, till in 851 the under-king and ealdorman of Kent repulsed a raid upon Sandwich, and even captured nine of the pirate ships. The squadron, however, which they thus beat off was only the advance guard of a host which was now preparing for an attack; and in the course of the same year a fleet of three hundred and fifty 1 This must have been very early; as Dover was already a port in Ealdhelm's day, and Sandwich in Wilfrid's. 3 Ibid. 839. 2 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 838. pirate vessels, starting, as it would seem, from the settlement which had been made in the island of Betau, moored at the mouth of the Thames,1 sacked Canterbury, pillaged London in spite of the efforts of the Mercian king, Beorhtwulf, who advanced to oppose them, and pushed through Surrey into the heart of Britain. Here however Ethelwulf, summoned at last to his aid by the Kentish king, threw himself across their path; and a long and stubborn fight at Aclea ended in the defeat of the marauders. More pirates fell on the field, boasted the conquerors, than had ever fallen on English ground before; and the completeness of the repulse was seen in the withdrawal of the host to its old field of plunder across the Channel. But the Wikings were far from any thought of abandoning their prey. Two years later two ealdormen, at the head of the fyrds of Kent and Surrey, fell after a wellfought fight with a host in Thanet; while in 855 the pirates encamped for the whole winter in the Isle of Sheppey. 2 CHAP. II. The Coming of the Wikings. 829 858 the North Welsh. What was needed to shake off this persistent attack Conquest of of the Wikings from Gaul was, as Ethelwulf saw, the alliance and co-operation of the Frankish king who was struggling against them in Gaul itself. If the first result of the pirate storm had been to further English unity by allying the new English state with the English Church, its second result was to force the state into closer relations with its fellow states of Christendom. At the beginning of his reign Æthelwulf had opened communications with the Emperor 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 851. 2 Ibid. a. 853. CHAP. II. The Coming of the Wikings. 829858. Lewis the Gentle for common action in meeting the common danger; but it is in his later years that we see the first distinct announcement of an international policy, the first English recognition of a common interest among the western nations, in the resolve of the king to cross the seas for counsel and concert with Charles the Bald. Work, however, had to be done before he could quit the realm.1 On both sides of the Channel, as we have seen, the appearance of the foe from the north had given a signal for the uprising of the Celt; and while in Gaul the Bretons had shaken off the yoke of Charles the Bald and set up again a Breton kingdom under Breton kings, in Britain the West-Welsh had risen against their WestSaxon overlords, and the North-Welsh had thrown off the Mercian supremacy. So formidable indeed was the last revolt that in 853, two years after the battle of Aclea, the Mercian king Burhred, Beorhtwulf's successor, was forced to appeal to his West-Saxon overlord for aid; and it was only a march of their joint forces into the heart of North Wales, with the conquest of Anglesea, that forced the Welsh ruler, Roderic Mawr, again to own the English supremacy and to pay tribute to Mercia. In spite of the wintering of a pirate force in Sheppey, the two triumphs of Æthelwulf in Surrey One 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 853; Asser (ed. Wise), p. 6. part of Ethelwulf's preparation was the grant of a sixth part of the rents from his private dominions for ecclesiastical and charitable purposes (Asser, ed. Wise, p. 8). By an early fraud this was represented as a grant of a tenth of the whole revenue of the kingdom, and as the legal origin of tithes. See Kemble, "Saxons in England," ii. 480-490. and in Wales left Britain sufficiently tranquil in 854 CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829858. Ethelwulf's visit to Bald. to suffer him to leave its shores. His first journey The Coming however recalls to us how much more the danger from the marauders seemed to men of that day religious than a political one. He undertook a pilgrimage to Rome. We know little of the pilgrimage or of his stay at the imperial city, though it lasted a whole year and cannot but have served to draw closer the connexion of the English Church with the Mother-Church from which it sprang. From Rome however he passed at length to the court. of the Franks. Blow after blow had shattered the Frankish state since Ecgberht half a century earlier quitted Charles the Great to seek his throne in Wessex. The vast realm had been torn to pieces by the dissensions of its rulers, as well as by the revival of national spirit among the peoples out of whom it had been built up. A ring of enemies had gathered round it on every border. Sclaves and Magyars pressed on its German frontier. The Saracens wasted Italy. The northmen carried fire and sword over western Frankland, the country west of the Meuse and the Rhone, a fragment of the old Frank realm which had fallen in the strife that followed the death of Lewis the Gentle to his youngest son, Charles the Bald. The reign of Charles had as yet been one of terrible misfortunes; for brave and active as he was, his vigour spent itself fruitlessly on the crowd of foes who surrounded him, on the rising of the Breton, the revolt of Gascony, the strife of his own house for rule, the never-ceasing forays of the northmen. Beaten and baffled as he seemed how G |