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HUNTING, HAWKS, AND HARPERS.

177

of cider, made from the juice of apples; and once or twice of morat, made from mulberries.

They sat at table, the women eating with the men. Spoons and knives were used. Forks are the invention of a much later age (not earlier than the sixteenth century).

The chief sport was hunting, of which the English were fond, but not with the passionate devotion that we find among their Norman conquerors. Deer were frequently caught in nets, and sometimes brought down with arrows, or hunted down by dogs. Boars were killed with spears. Hawks were used for the capture of larger birds, especially herons.

Of indoor games we hear of none but a kind of draughts. The wealthy had harpers, gleemen, jesters, and tumblers, who amused them at their meals and during the long drinking bouts which commonly followed them.

XVII.

WESSEX AND EGBERT.

WESSEX has often been mentioned in the chapters which have been devoted to describing the rise and fall of Northumbria and Mercia. To these notices there is little that we need or indeed that we are able to add. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is indeed principally a record of West Saxon doings, but it is meagre in the extreme except where it has been supplemented from Bede, and Bede, as a Northumbrian, makes little mention of Wessex. For the first fifty years after the deposition of Ceawlin in 592 the West Saxons were chiefly occupied in warfare with their British neighbours on the west. In 607 we hear of a battle with the South Saxons, which was apparently decisive of West Saxon superiority. Some thirty years after came the conversion of the royal house to Christianity, followed, probably, at no long interval by that of the people. In 672 we have the novel incident, novel indeed then, but not at all out of agreement with German ways of thinking,1 of a

1 Tacitus speaks of the high honour in which the Germans held their women and of the royal power which they sometimes bestowed upon them.

STORY OF INA'S ABDICATION.

179

reigning queen. King Cenwalh died, and Sexburh, his queen, reigned for one year after him. This was in 672-3. Fifteen years later began the reign of the most distinguished of the kings who ruled in Wessex during its period of depression, Ina. He reigned for thirty-eight years, and then resigned his crown, weary of the vanity of human things. His supremacy, at one period of his reign, was not less than that which had been exercised by his predecessor Ceawlin. Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia owned his overlordship. On the west he pushed the Britons back beyond the Parret, and built a border fortress at Taunton. But civil strife, which was again and again the source of weakness among the West Saxons, disturbed his latter days.

The story of his abdication is curious, and characteristic of the times. He and his queen had spent the night at one of the royal palaces, and had been splendidly entertained by its keeper. The next morning they departed, but after a while Ina was persuaded by his queen to turn back. When they reached the palace they found that it had been made filthy with the dung of cattle, while in the royal bed a sow, with its newly-farrowed litter of pigs, had been placed. The warden had done this at the Queen's order. Ina turned to her for an explanation of so strange a sight, and she preached him a sermon on the vanity of human greatness, the quick changes which bring high things low. The King was so impressed by the discourse and its forcible illustration, that he at once carried out a purpose which he had long entertained: he laid down his crown, went on a pilgrimage to Rome,

and there spent the remainder of his life in practices of devotion. The greatest memorial of himself which Ina left behind him was his code of laws, founded on the institutions of his people, and itself made the groundwork of more complete systems by the rulers that came after him. But it must not be forgotten that he was one of the most liberal benefactors of his race to the churches and monastic foundations of Wessex.

All that is essential for our purpose in the history of the next sixty years has already been told, and we may pass on at once to the events which led to the restoration of the supremacy to Wessex, and ultimately to the union of the country under one

crown.

Egbert, son of Edmund, sub-king of Kent, and fourth in descent from Ingild, brother of the great Ina, claimed, or had claimed on his behalf, the throne of Wessex on the death of Cynewulf (784). He was then a boy, according to one account, not more than nine years of age. The people preferred his kinsman Brihtric; and Egbert, to save his life, fled to Offa, King of Mercia. Offa, though he would not give him up to his enemies, was unable or unwilling to shelter him, and the young prince made his way to the Court of Charles the Great (Charlemagne). Charles was then in the midst of his career of conquest, and Egbert, though we know no particulars of his life during these years, probably served in his armies. But Charles was not only a conqueror; he was a ruler also, as great in peace as he was in war. The countries which he subdued he made into a great empire, divided into

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