tribute owned his supremacy. of the Danelaw. 858. 878. brought Wessex face to face with the pirates. The The Making southern kingdom stood utterly alone, for the work of Ecgberht had been undone at a blow, and but five years' fighting had sufficed to tear England north of Thames from its overlordship. It is hard to believe that such a revolution can have been wholly wrought by the Danish sword, or that conquests so rapid and so complete as those of Ivar can have been made possible save by the temper of the lands he won. The English realms were still in fact far from owning themselves as an English nation. To Northumbria, to Mercia, to East Anglia, their conquest by the Dane must have seemed little save a transfer from one foreign overlord to another; and it may be that in each of the three lands there were men who preferred the supremacy of the Dane to the supremacy of the West-Saxon. But the loss of the two kingdoms left Wessex alone before the heathen foe. The time had come when it had to fight not for supremacy but for life. It was the last obstacle in the pirate's path. Elsewhere all had gone well with him. Britain seemed on the point of becoming a Scandinavian land. The Orkney Jarls had conquered Caithness. The Scot King had become a tributary of the northmen. Northumbria and East Anglia lay in Danish hands, while Mid-Britain owned their supremacy. Nor did the conquest of Wessex promise to be a hard matter. Except in his one march upon Nottingham, Ethelred had done nothing to save his underkingdoms from the wreck; and when the pirate host set out from East Anglia its work in southern H CHAP. III. Britain promised to be as easy and complete as its The Making Work in the north. of the Danelaw, 858878. Berkshire. The leader in the new fray was no longer Ragnar's son, Ivar, who seems to have returned to his conquest The Danes in of Deira, while his brother Hubba had put afresh to sea with a Wiking fleet which we shall find later on in the Bristol Channel; but Guthrum or Gorm, who may (as later genealogies told) have been of kin to the Gorm who was soon to draw the Danish people together into a kingdom of Denmark. With him marched Bægsceg, the Danish King of Bernicia, and a crowd of jarls, Sidroc the Old and Sidroc the Young, Osbern, and Fræna, and Harald among them.' In 871 their host sailed up the Thames past London, and seized a tongue of land some half a mile from Reading for its camp. The country which was to form the scene of the coming struggle was the square of rough forest-country to which the abundance of "bearroc" or box-trees among its woodlands gave the name of Berkshire, a district wedged as it were into an angle which the Thames makes as it runs from its head-waters eastward to Oxford and then turns suddenly to the south to cleave its way through chalk uplands to Reading and the Kennet valley. The bulk of the shire was still wild and thinly peopled, for chalk downs spread over the heart of it from the Thames to Hampshire, and the fertile 2 1 We know these as having fallen at Ashdown. Asser (ed. Wise), p. 23. 2 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 871. 3 Asser (ed. Wise), p. 1. "Illa paga quæ nominatur Bearrocscire, quæ paga taliter vocatur a Berroc sylva, ubi buxus abundantissime nascitur." CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858- Kennet valley to the south lay pressed between these One of these king's-tuns, that of Wantage,' had been the birthplace of the youngest of Ethelwulf's sons, the Ætheling Elfred." Young as he still was, Elfred's life had been a stirring and eventful one. He was but four years old when he was sent with a company of nobles to Rome, on an embassy which paved the way for Ethelwulf's own visit two years later, and he returned to the imperial city in his father's train. The boy's long stay there, as well as 3 1 "In villâ regia quæ dicitur Wanading," Asser (ed. Wise), p. 1. 2 For Ælfred's life the main authority must be the work attributed to Asser. Its genuineness, which was disputed by Mr. Wright ("Biographia Britannica Literaria"), is admitted by almost all other scholars; though the critical examination of Pauli ("Life of Alfred," pp. 4-11) shows in how damaged a state the book has come down to us. In spite of all difficulties however "no theory of the authorship or date of the work," says Mr. Earle ("Parallel Chronicles," Intr. p. lvi.), "has ever been proposed which on the whole meets the facts of the case better than that set forth in the book itself, that it was written in 893." Asser has embodied the whole contents of the existing chronicle from 851 to 887, a point at which there are good grounds for believing the Chronicle, as Alfred found it, to have ended. This coincidence "is strongly in favour of the professed date." 3 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 853, Elfred. 2930684 CHAP. III. at the Frankish court, left a mark on his mind which The Making we can trace through all his after life. of the Danelaw. 858878. His political position. English as Ælfred was to the core, his international temper, his freedom from a narrow insularism, his sense of the common interests and brotherhood of Christian nations, pointed back to the childish days when he looked on the wonders of Rome or listened to the scholars and statesmen who thronged the court of Charles the Bald. There was little, as we have seen, to break the peace of the land as the Ætheling grew to manhood save passing raids of the northmen from Gaul, and the vigour and restlessness of the boy's temper found no outlet for itself but in the chase. But the thirst for knowledge was already quickening within him. It was one of the bitter regrets of his after life that at this time, when he had leisure and will to learn, he could find no man to teach him. But what he could learn he learned. The love of English verse which never left him dated from these earlier days. It was a book of English songs which (if we accept the story in spite of its difficulties)1 his mother promised to the first of her sons who learned to read it. The beauty of its letters caught Ælfred's eye, and seizing the book from his mother's hand, he sought a master who repeated it to him till the boy's memory enabled him to recite its poems by heart.2 As yet however his temper had little political importance; for he stood far from the throne. But death was already paving his way to it. Æthelbald enjoyed the crown but two years after his father's 1 See Pauli's criticisms, "Life of Alfred," p. 51. death; and only six years later the death of Ethel CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858 878. berht in 866, and the accession of his one surviving The Making brother Ethelred, set Ælfred next in the accepted order of succession to the West-Saxon throne. The stress of events too called him now to sterner studies than those of letters, for though the consolidation of the Eastern Kingdom with the rest of the monarchy hindered him from becoming its under-king, he held an office, that of Secundarius, in which we may perhaps see a germ of the later Justiciarship; and it was in discharge of these new duties that he marched at nineteen with his brother to the Trent. The policy of Ecgberht's house aimed at a close union with Central Britain: a sister of Ælfred was already wife of the Mercian king; and in Ælfred's union at this moment with the daughter of an ealdorman of the Gainas, we see a trace of the same policy which brought about in later days the marriage of his own daughter with the Mercian Ethelred.' But the marriage feast was roughly broken up, for the young husband was seized in the midst of it with a disease, probably that of epilepsy, from which he was never afterwards to be wholly free. Neither sickness nor marriage however held Ælfred back from the field; he fought in the West-Saxon ranks at Nottingham;2 and now that the Dane attacked his own Wessex he led the van of his brother's host. It may have been to save the home of his childhood that the young Etheling fought so stoutly in the after fights. But king and people fought as stoutly as Alfred himself, for now that they were 1 Asser (ed. Wise), p. 59. 2 Eng. Chron. a. 868. Success of the Danes. |