Opening…

Preface

When adding one more to the numerous histories of England which have appeared of late years, the author feels that he must justify his conduct. Ten years of teaching in the Honour School of Modern History in the University of Oxford have convinced him that there may still be room for a single-volume history of moderate compass, which neither cramps the earlier annals of our island into a few pages, nor expands the last two centuries into unmanageable bulk. He trusts that his book may be useful to the higher forms of schools, and for the pass examinations of the Universities. The kindly reception which his History of Greece has met both here and in America, leads him to hope that a volume constructed on the same scale and the same lines may be not less fortunate.

He has to explain one or two points which may lead to criticism. In Old-English names he has followed the correct and original forms, save in some few cases, such as Edward and Alfred, where a close adherence to correctness might savour of pedantry. He wishes the maps to be taken, not as superseding the use of an atlas, but as giving boundaries, local details, and sites in which many atlases will be found wanting.

Finally, he has to give his best thanks to friends who were good enough to correct certain sections of the book--especially to Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls' College, Mr. C. H. Turner of Magdalen College, and Mr. F. Haverfield of Christ Church. But most of all does he owe gratitude to the indefatigable compiler of the Index, whose hands made a burden into a pleasure.

OXFORD, January 25, 1895.

PREFACE TO THE NINTH EDITION.

The fact that this book has passed through nine editions in seven years seems to show that it was not altogether written in vain, and has answered the purpose for which it was written.

The first edition carried the history of Great Britain to the year 1885. I have now prolonged it to the year 1902. The termination of the long reign of Queen Victoria, the end of the century, and the long-delayed pacification of South Africa, appeared to provide landmarks to which the narrative ought to be extended.

I have to thank many kind correspondents for corrections and suggestions made during the last seven years. They will note that their hints have not been neglected. A special word of thanks is due to the Rev. A. Beaven of Leamington, for a very copious and useful list of corrigenda, of which I have made full use.

OXFORD, September 15, 1902.

III. THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND, AND THE RISE OF WESSEX. 597-836 23

IV. THE DANISH INVASIONS, AND THE GREAT KINGS OF WESSEX, 836-975 33

V. THE DAYS OF CNUT AND EDWARD THE CONFESSOR 51

VI. THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066-1087 67

VII. WILLIAM THE RED--HENRY I.--STEPHEN. 1087-1154 81

VIII. HENRY II. 1154-1189 97

IX. RICHARD I. AND JOHN. 1189-1216 114

X. HENRY III. 1216-1272 134

XI. EDWARD I. 1272-1307 148

XII. EDWARD II. 1307-1327 171

XIII. EDWARD III. 1327-1377 180

XIV. RICHARD II. 1377-1399 202

XV. HENRY IV. 1399-1413 213

XVI. HENRY V. 1413-1422 220

XVII. THE LOSS OF FRANCE. 1422-1453 231

XVIII. THE WARS OF THE ROSES. 1454-1471 245

XIX. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF YORK. 1471-1485 260

XX. HENRY VII. 1485-1509 272

XXI. HENRY VIII., AND THE BREACH WITH ROME. 1509-1536 282

XXII. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. 1536-1553 296

XXIII. THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 1553-1558 314

XXIV. ELIZABETH. 1558-1603 322

XXV. JAMES I. 1603-1625 350

XXVI. THE REIGN OF CHARLES I. TO THE OUTBREAK OF THE CIVIL WAR. 1625-1642 362

XXVII. THE GREAT CIVIL WAR. 1642-1651 380

XXVIII. CROMWELL. 1651-1660 406

XXIX. CHARLES II. 1660-1685 420

XXX. JAMES II. 1685-1688 436

XXXI. ENGLAND AFTER THE REVOLUTION. 1688-1702 445

XXXII. ANNE. 1702-1714 461

XXXIII. THE RULE OF THE WHIGS. 1714-1739 482

XXXIV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLONIAL EMPIRE OF BRITAIN. 1739-1760 498

XXXV. GEORGE III. AND THE WHIGS--THE AMERICAN WAR. 1760-1783 532

XXXVI. THE YOUNGER PITT, AND THE RECOVERY OF ENGLISH PROSPERITY. 1782-1793 554

XXXVII. ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 1789-1802 574

XXXVIII. ENGLAND AND BONAPARTE. 1802-1815 598

XXXIX. REACTION AND REFORM. 1815-1832 633

XL. CHARTISM AND THE CORN LAWS. 1832-1852 652

XLI. THE DAYS OF PALMERSTON. 1852-1865 673

XLII. DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM. 1865-1885 700

XLIII. THE LAST YEARS OF QUEEN VICTORIA, 1886-1901--THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR. 1899-1902 718

XLIV. INDIA AND THE COLONIES. 1815-1902 734

INDEX 757

MAPS AND PLANS.

PAGE

THE GAELIC AND BRITISH TRIBES IN BRITAIN 3

ROMAN BRITAIN 10

ENGLAND IN THE YEAR 570 18

ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY 30

ENGLAND IN THE YEAR 900 41

FRANCE IN THE REIGN OF HENRY II. 98

THE BATTLE OF LEWES 142

THE BATTLE OF EVESHAM 145

WALES IN 1282 154

THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN 174

THE BATTLE OF CRÉCY 188

THE BATTLE OF POICTIERS 191

FRANCE AFTER THE TREATY OF BRETIGNY 194

THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT 223

THE BATTLE OF EDGEHILL 384

ENGLAND AT THE END OF 1643 388

THE BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR 390

THE BATTLE OF NASEBY 394

THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS, 1702 466

THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM 467

SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 506

ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN AMERICA, 1756 521

THE BATTLE OF QUEBEC 527

INDIA IN THE TIME OF WARREN HASTINGS 570

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, 1803-1814 616

EUROPE IN 1811-1812 620

THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO 629

SEBASTOPOL, 1854 686

THEATRE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR OF 1899-1902 730

INDIA, 1815-1890 736

GENEALOGICAL TABLES.

PAGE

THE HOUSE OF ECGBERT 66

THE HOUSE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 80

THE SCOTTISH SUCCESSION, 1292 160

THE FRENCH SUCCESSION, 1337 184

THE DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III. 201

THE KIN OF CHARLES V. 286

THE SPANISH SUCCESSION, 1699 457

The HOUSE OF STUART 481

The HOUSE OF HANOVER 497

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. CELTIC AND ROMAN BRITAIN

In the dim dawn of history our island was a land of wood and marsh, broken here and there by patches of open ground, and pierced by occasional track-ways, which threaded the forest and circled round the edges of the impassable fen. The inhabited districts of the country were not the fertile river-bottoms where population grew thick in after-days; these were in primitive times nothing but sedgy water-meadows or matted thickets. Men dwelt rather on the thinly wooded upland, where, if the soil was poor, it was at any rate free from the tangled undergrowth that covered the valleys. It was on the chalk ridges of Kent or Wilts, or the moorland hills of Yorkshire or Cornwall, rather than on the brink of the Thames or Severn, that the British tribes clustered thick. Down by the rivers there were but small settlements of hunters and fishers perched on some knoll that rose above the brake and the rushes.

The earliest explorers from the south, who described the inhabitants of Britain, seem to have noticed little difference between one wild tribe and another. But as a matter of fact the islanders were divided into two or perhaps three distinct races, who had passed westward into our island at very different dates. First had come a short dark people, who knew not the use of metals, and wielded weapons of flint and bone. They were in the lowest grade of savagery, had not even learnt to till the soil, and lived by fishing and hunting. They dwelt in rude huts, or even in the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the wolf.

[Sidenote: =The Celts, Gael, and Britons.=]

Long after these primitive settlers, the first wave of the Celts, seven or eight centuries before Christ, came flooding all over Western Europe, and drove the earlier races into nooks and corners of the earth. They crossed over into Britain after overrunning the lands on the other side of the Channel, and gradually conquered the whole island, as well as its neighbour, Erin. The Celts came in two waves; the first, composed of the people who were called Gael, seem to have appeared many generations before the second, who bore the name of Britons.

The Gael are the ancestors of the people of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, while the Britons occupied the greater part of England and Wales, and are the progenitors of the Welsh of to-day. The old savage race who held the islands before the Celts appeared, were partly exterminated and partly absorbed by the new-comers. The Celts on the eastern side of the island remained unmixed with their predecessors; but into the mountainous districts of the west they penetrated in less numbers, and there the ancient inhabitants were not slain off, but became the serfs of their conquerors. Thus the eastern shore of Britain became a purely Celtic land; but in the districts along the shore of the Irish Sea, where the Gael bore rule, the blood of the earlier race remained, and the population was largely non-Celtic. There are to this day regions where the survival of the ancient inhabitants can be traced by the preponderance of short stature and dark hair among the inhabitants. Many such are to be found both in South Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. The Gael, therefore, were of much less pure blood than the later-coming Britons.

The Britons and their Gaelic kinsmen, though far above the degraded tribes whom they had supplanted, still showed many signs of savagery. They practised horrid rites of human sacrifice, in which they burnt captives alive to their gods, cramming them into huge images of wicker-work. But the barbarous practice which most astonished the ancient world was their custom of marking themselves with bright blue patterns painted with the dye of woad, and this led the Romans to give the northern tribes, who retained the custom longest, the name of the Picti, or "painted men."

The Celts were a tall, robust, fair-haired race, who had reached a certain stage of civilization. They tilled the fields and sailed the seas, but their chief wealth consisted in great herds of cattle, which they pastured in the forest-clearings which then constituted inhabited Britain. They wore armour of bronze, and used brazen weapons, to which in a later time they added iron weapons also. They delighted to adorn their persons with "torques" or necklaces of twisted gold. Their chiefs went out to war in chariots drawn by small shaggy horses, but alighted, like the ancient Greeks of the Heroic Age, when the hand-to-hand fighting began.

Like all Celtic tribes in all ages, the Britons and the Gael showed small capacity for union. They dwelt apart in many separate tribes, though sometimes a great and warlike chief would compel one or two of his neighbours to do him homage. But such kingdoms usually fell to pieces at the death of the warrior who had built them up. After the kings and chiefs, the most important class among the Celts was that of the Druids, a caste of priests and soothsayers, who possessed great influence over the people. They it was who kept up the barbarous sacrifices which we have already mentioned. Although tribal wars were incessant, yet the Britons had learnt some of the arts of peace, and traded with each other and with the Celts across the Channel. For the tin of Cornwall it would seem that they made barter with the adventurous traders who pushed their way across Gaul from the distant Mediterranean to buy that metal, which was very rare in the ancient world. The Britons used money of gold and of tin, on which they stamped a barbarous copy of the devices on the coins of Philip, the great King of Macedonia, whose gold pieces found their way in the course of trade even to the shores of the Channel. The fact that they had discovered the advantages of a coinage proves sufficiently that they were no longer mere savages.

[Sidenote: =Invasion of Julius Cæsar.=]

We have no materials for constructing a history of the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Britain till the middle of the first century before Christ, when the great Roman conqueror, Julius Cæsar, who had just subdued northern Gaul, determined to cross the straits and invade Britain. He wished to strike terror into its inhabitants, for the tribes south of the Thames were closely connected with their kinsmen on the other side of the Channel, and he suspected them of stirring up trouble among the Gauls. Cæsar took over two legions and disembarked near Romney (B.C. 55). The natives thronged down to the shore to oppose him, but his veterans plunged into the shallows, fought their way to land, and beat the Britons back into the interior. He found, however, that the land would not be an easy conquest, for all the tribes of the south turned out in arms against him. Therefore he took his legions back to Gaul as the autumn drew on, vowing to return in the next year.

In B.C. 54 he brought over an army twice as large as his first expedition, and boldly pushed into the interior. Cassivelaunus, the greatest chief of eastern Britain, roused a confederacy of tribes against him; but Cæsar forced the passage of the Thames, and burnt the great stockaded village in the woods beyond that river, where his enemy dwelt. Many of the neighbouring princes then did him homage; but troubles in Gaul called him home again, and he left the island, taking with him naught save a few hostages and a vague promise of tribute and submission from the kings of Kent.

[Sidenote: =Commerce with Europe.=]

Nearly a hundred years passed before Britain was to see another Roman army. The successors of Julius Cæsar left the island to itself, and it was only by peaceful commerce with the provinces of Gaul that the Britons learnt to know of the great empire that had come to be their neighbour. But there grew up a considerable intercourse between Britain and the continent: the Roman traders came over to sell the luxuries of the South to the islanders, and British kings more than once visited Rome to implore the aid of the emperor against their domestic enemies.

[Sidenote: =Invasion of Claudius, A.D. 43.=]

But such aid was not granted, and the island, though perceptibly influenced by Roman civilization, was for long years not touched by the Roman sword. At last, in A.D. 43, Claudius Cæsar resolved to subdue the Britons. The island was in its usual state of disorder, after the death of a great king named Cunobelinus--Shakespeare's "Cymbeline"--who had held down south-eastern Britain in comparative quiet and prosperity for many years. Some of the chiefs who fared ill in the civil wars asked Claudius to restore them, and he resolved to make their petition an excuse for conquering the island. Accordingly his general, Aulus Plautius, crossed the Channel, and overran Kent and the neighbouring districts in a few weeks. So easy was the conquest that the unwarlike emperor himself ventured over to Britain, and saw his armies cross the Thames, and occupy Camulodunum (Colchester), which had been the capital of King Cymbeline, and now was made a Roman colony, and re-named after Claudius himself.

[Sidenote: =South-eastern Britain subdued.=]

The emperor returned to Rome after sixteen days spent in the island, there to build himself a memorial arch, and to celebrate a triumph in full form for the conquest of Britain. Aulus Plautius remained behind with four legions, and completed the subjection of the lands which lie between the Wash and Southampton Water, and thus formed the first Roman province in the island. There does not seem to have been very much serious fighting required to reduce the tribes of south-eastern Britain; the conquerors consented to accept as their vassals those chiefs who chose to do homage, and only used their arms against such tribes as refused to acknowledge the emperor's suzerainty.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of Boadicea.=]

Under successive governors the size of the province of Britain continued to grow, till in the reign of Nero it had advanced up to the line of the Severn and Humber, and included all the central and southern counties of modern England. But the wild tribes of the Welsh mountains and the Yorkshire moors opposed a determined resistance to the conquerors, and did not yield till a much later date. While the governor Suetonius Paulinus was engaged in a campaign on the Menai Straits, against the tribe of the Ordovices, there burst out behind him the celebrated rebellion of Queen Boudicca (Boadicea). This rising began among the Iceni, the tribe who dwelt in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk. They had long been governed by a vassal king; but when he died sonless, the Romans annexed his dominions and cruelly ill-treated his widow Boudicca and her daughters. Bleeding from the Roman rods, the indignant queen called her tribesmen to arms, and massacred all the Romans within her reach. All the tribes of eastern Britain rose to aid her, and the rebels cut to pieces the Ninth Legion, and sacked the three towns of Londinium, Verulamium, and Camulodunum,[1] slaying, it is said, as many as 70,000 persons in their wild cruelty. But presently the governor Paulinus returned from his campaign in Wales at the head of his army, and in a great battle defeated and destroyed the British hordes. Boudicca, who had led them to the field in person, slew herself when she saw the battle lost (A.D. 61).

[Sidenote: =Agricola Governor of Britain, A.D. 78-85.=]

Southern Britain never rose again, but the Romans had great trouble in conquering the Silurians and Ordovices of Wales, and the Brigantes beyond the Humber. They were finally subdued by the great general Agricola, who governed the British province from 78 to 85. This good man was the father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, who wrote his life--a document from which great part of our knowledge of Roman Britain is derived. After conquering North-Wales and Yorkshire, Agricola marched northward against the Gaelic tribes of Scotland. He overran the Lowlands, and then pushed forward into the hills of the Highlands. At a spot called the Graupian Mountain (Mons Graupius) somewhere in Perthshire, he defeated the Caledonians, the fierce race who dwelt beyond the Forth and Clyde, with great slaughter. It was his purpose to conquer the whole island to its northernmost cape, and even to subdue the neighbouring Gaels of Ireland. But ere his task was complete the cruel and suspicious emperor Domitian called him home, because he envied and feared his military talents.

The province of Britain remained very much as Agricola had left it, stopping short at the Forth, and leaving the Scottish Highlands outside the Roman pale. It was held down by three Roman legions, each of whom watched one of the three most unruly of the British tribes; one at Eboracum (York) curbed the Brigantes; a second at Deva (Chester) observed the Ordovices; and a third at Isca (Caerleon-on-Usk) was responsible for the good behaviour of the Silurians.

Agricola did much to make the Roman rule more palatable to the Britons by his wise ordinances for the government of the province. He tried to persuade the Celtic chiefs to learn Latin, and to take to civilized ways of life, as their kinsmen in Gaul had done. He kept the land so safe and well guarded that thousands of settlers from the continent came to dwell in its towns. His efforts won much success, and for the future, southern Britain was a very quiet province.

[Sidenote: =The Wall of Hadrian.=]

But the Caledonians to the north retained their independence, and often raided into the Lowlands, while the Brigantes of Yorkshire still kept rising in rebellion, and once in the reign of Hadrian massacred the whole legion that garrisoned York. It was perhaps this disaster that drew Hadrian himself to Britain in the course of his never-ending travels. The emperor journeyed across the isle, and resolved to fix the Roman boundary on a line traced across the Northumbrian moors from Carlisle to Newcastle. There was erected the celebrated "Wall of Hadrian," a solid stone wall drawn in front of the boundary-ditch that marked the old frontier, and furnished with forts at convenient intervals. This enormous work, eighty miles long, reached from sea to sea, and was garrisoned by a number of "auxiliary cohorts," or regiments drawn from the subject tribes of the empire--Moors, Spaniards, Thracians, and many more--for the Romans did not trust British troops to hold the frontier against their own untamed kinsmen. The legion at York remained behind to support the garrison of the wall in case of necessity.

[Sidenote: =The Wall of Antoninus.=]

A few years later the continued trouble which the northern parts of Britain suffered from the raids of the Caledonians, caused the governors of the province to build another wall in advance of that of Hadrian. This outer line of defence, a less solid work than that which ran from Newcastle to Carlisle, was composed of a trench, and an earthern wall of sods, drawn from the mouth of the Forth to the mouth of the Clyde, at the narrowest part of the island. It is generally called the Wall of Antoninus, from the name of the emperor who was reigning when it was erected.

[Sidenote: =Campaign of Severus in Caledonia.=]

Only once more did the Romans make any endeavour to complete the subjection of Britain by adding the Gaelic tribes of the Scottish Highlands to the list of their tributaries. In 208-9-10 the warlike emperor Severus led the legions north of the Wall of Antoninus, and set to work to tame the Caledonians by felling their forests, building roads across their hills, and erecting forts among them. He overran the land beyond the Firth of Forth, and might perchance have ended by conquering the whole island, but he died of disease at York early in 211. His successors drew back, abandoned his conquests, and never attempted again to subjugate the Caledonians.

[Sidenote: =Roman civilization in Britain.=]

Altogether the Romans abode in Britain for three hundred and sixty years (A.D. 43 to A.D. 410). Their occupation of the land was mainly a military one, and they never succeeded in teaching the mass of the natives to abandon their Celtic tongue, or to take up Roman customs and habits. The towns indeed were Romanized, and great military centres like Eboracum and Deva, or commercial centres like London, were filled with a Latin-speaking population, and boasted of fine temples, baths, and public buildings. But the villagers of the open country, and the Celtic landholders who dwelt among them, were very little influenced by the civilization of the town-dwellers, and lived on by themselves much in the way of their ancestors, worshipping the same Celtic gods, using the same rude tools and vessels, and dwelling in the same low clay huts, though the townsmen were accustomed to build stone houses after the Roman fashion, to employ all manner of foreign luxuries, and to translate into Minerva, or Apollo, or Mars, the names of their old Celtic deities Sul, or Mabon, or Belucatadrus.

The Romans greatly changed the face of Britain by their great engineering works. They drew broad roads from place to place, seldom turning aside to avoid forest or river. Their solidly-built causeways were carried across the marshy tracts, and pierced through the midst of the densest woods. Where the road went, clearings on each side were made, and population sprang up in what had hitherto been trackless wilderness. The Romans explored the remotest corners of Wales and Cornwall in their search after mineral wealth; they worked many tin, lead, and copper mines in the island, and exported the ores to Gaul and Italy. They developed the fisheries of Britain, especially the oyster fishery; not only did they prize British pearls, but the oysters themselves were exported as a special luxury to the distant capital of the world. They improved the farming of the open country so much that in years of scarcity the corn of Britain fed northern Gaul. In the more pleasant corners of the land Roman officials or wealthy merchants built themselves fine villas, with floors of mosaic, and elaborate heating-apparatus to guard them against the cold of the northern winter. Hundreds of such abodes are to be found: they clustered especially thick along the south coast and in the vale of Gloucester.

Gauls, Italians, Greeks, and Orientals came to share in the trade of Britain, and at the same time many of its natives must have crossed to the continent, notably those who were sent to serve in the auxiliary cohorts of Britons, which formed part of the Roman army, and were quartered on the Rhine and Danube. But in spite of all this intercourse, the Celts did not become Romanized like the Gauls or Spaniards; the survival of their native tongue to this day sufficiently proves it. In all the other provinces of the West, Latin completely extinguished the old native languages. In the towns, however, the Britons often took Roman names, and men of note in the countryside did the same. Many of the commonest Welsh names of to-day are corrupt forms of Latin names: Owen, for example, is a degradation from Eugenius, and Rhys from Ambrosius, though they have lost so entirely the shape of their ancient originals.

[Sidenote: =Britain harassed by barbarians.=]

Britain shared with the other provinces in the disasters which fell upon the empire in the third century, in the days of the weak usurpers who held the imperial throne after the extinction of the family of Severus. Three races are recorded as having troubled the land: the first was the ancient enemy, the Caledonians from beyond the wall, whom now the Chronicles generally style Picts, "the painted men," because they alone of the inhabitants of Britain still retained the barbarous habit of tattooing themselves. The second foe was the race of the Saxons, the German tribes who dwelt by the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. They were great marauders by sea, and so vexed the east of Britain by their descents that the emperors created an officer called "The Count of the Saxon Shore,"[2] whose duty was to guard the coast from the Wash as far as Beachy Head by a chain of castles on the water's edge, and a flotilla of war-galleys. The third enemy was the Scottish race, a tribe who then occupied northern Ireland, and had not yet moved across to the land which now bears their name. They infested the shores of the province which lay between the Clyde and the Severn.

[Sidenote: =Carausius.=]

Attacked at once by Pict and Scot and Saxon, the province declined in prosperity, and gained little help from the continent where emperors were being made and remade at the rate of about one every three years. Britain seems to have first recovered herself in the time of Carausius, a "Count of the Saxon Shore," who proclaimed himself emperor, and reigned as an independent sovereign on our side of the Channel (287). His fleet drove off the Saxons, and his armies held back the Pict and Scot as long as he lived. But after a reign of seven years the rebel emperor was murdered, and three years later the province was reunited to the empire.

[Sidenote: =Constantius and Constantine.=]

For the next twenty years Britain was under the rule of the emperors Constantius and Constantine, both of whom dwelt much in the island, and paid attention to its needs. Constantius died at York, and his son, Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, went forth from Britain to conquer all the Roman world. But with the extinction of this great man's family in 362, evil days began once more. Barbarians were thronging round every frontier of the empire, greedy for the plunder of its great cities, while within were weak rulers, vexed by constant military rebellions. The Pict, the Scot, and the Saxon returned to Britain in greater force than before, and pushed their raids into the very heart of the province. Meanwhile, the soldiery who should have defended the island were constantly being drawn away by ambitious generals, who wished to use them in attempts to seize Italy, and win the imperial diadem. The ruin of Britain must be attributed to this cause more than to any other: twice the whole of its garrison was taken across the Channel by the rebellious governors, who had staked their all on the cast for empire. It was after the second of these rebels had failed, in 410, that the feeble Honorius, the legitimate emperor of the West, refused to send back any troops to guard the unprotected island, and bade the dismayed provincials do their best to defend themselves, because he was unable to give them any assistance.

[Sidenote: =Britain deserted by the Romans.=]

Britain therefore ceased to belong to the Roman empire, not because it wished to throw off the yoke, but because its masters declared that they could no longer protect it. Its inhabitants were by no means anxious to shift for themselves, and more than once they sent pathetic appeals to Rome to ask for aid against the savage Picts and Saxons. One of these appeals was written more than thirty years after Honorius abandoned the province. It was called "The Groans of the Britons," and ran thus: "The barbarians drive us into the sea, the sea drives us back on to the barbarians. Our only choice is whether we shall die by the sword or drown: for we have none to save us" (446).

In spite of these doleful complaints, Britain made a better fight against her invaders than did any other of the provinces which the Romans were constrained to abandon in the fifth century. But, unfortunately for themselves, the Britons were inspired by the usual Celtic spirit of disunion, and fell asunder into many states the moment that the hand of the master was removed. Sometimes they combined under a single leader, when the stress of invasion was unusually severe, but such leagues were precarious and temporary. The list of their princes shows that some of them were Romanized Britons, others pure Celts. By the side of names like Ambrosius, Constantine, Aurelius, Gerontius, Paternus, we have others like Vortigern, Cunedda, Maelgwn, and Kynan. Arthur, the legendary chief under whom the Britons are said to have turned back the Saxon invaders for a time, was--if he ever existed--the bearer of a Roman name, a corruption of Artorius. But Arthur's name and exploits are only found in romantic tales; the few historians of the time have no mention of him.

[Sidenote: =Christianity in Britain.=]

Celtic Britain, when the Romans abandoned it, had become a Christian country. Of the details of conversion of the land, we have only a few stories of doubtful authenticity; but we know that British bishops existed, and attended synods and councils on the continent, and that there were many churches scattered over the face of the land. The Britons were even beginning to send missionaries across the sea in the fifth century. St. Patrick, the apostle of the Irish Gael, was a native of the northern part of Roman Britain, who had been stolen as a slave by Scottish pirates, and returned after his release to preach the gospel to them, somewhere about the year 440. His name (Patricius) clearly shows that he was a Romanized Briton. A less happy product of the island was the heretical preacher Pelagius, whose doctrines spread far over all Western Europe, and roused the anger of the great African saint, Augustine of Hippo.

Here we must leave Celtic Britain, as the darkness of the fifth century closes over it. For a hundred and fifty years our knowledge of its history is most vague and fragmentary, and when next we see the island clearly, the larger half of it has passed into the hands of a new people, and is called England, and no longer Britain.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] London, St. Albans, Colchester.

[2] Comes Littoris Saxonici.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. THE COMING OF THE ENGLISH

In the early half of the fifth century it seemed likely that Britain would become the prey of its old enemies the Picts and Scots, rather than of the more distant Saxons. But the wild tribes of the North came to plunder only, while the pirates from the Elbe and Eider had larger designs.

The conquest of Britain by the Angles and Saxons differed in every way from that of the other Western provinces of the Roman empire by the kindred tribes of the Goths, the Franks, and the Lombards. The Goths and the Franks had dwelt for two hundred years on the borders of the empire; they had traded with its merchants, served as mercenaries in its armies, and learnt to appreciate its luxuries. Many of them had accepted Christianity long before their conquest of the provinces which they turned into Teutonic kingdoms. But the Saxons were plunged in the blackest heathendom and barbarism, dwelling as they did by the Elbe and Eider, far at the back of the tribes that had any touch with or knowledge of the empire and its civilization. The Goth and the Frank came to enslave, and to enjoy; the Angle and the Saxon were bent purely on a work of destruction. Hence it came that, instead of contenting themselves with overthrowing the provincial government, and enthralling the inhabitants of the land, they swept away everything before them, and replaced the old civilization of Britain by a perfectly new social organization of their own.

[Sidenote: =Hengist and Horsa, 449.--Kingdom of Kent.=]

If the Welsh legends speak truly, the first settlement of the Saxons on British soil was caused by the unwisdom of the native kings. We are told that Vortigern, the monarch who ruled Kent and south-eastern Britain, was so harried by the Picts and Scots that he sent in despair to hire some German chiefs to fight his battles for him. The story may be true, for in the decaying days of the Roman empire the Cæsars themselves had often hired one barbarian to fight another, and the British king may well have followed their example. The legend then proceeds to tell how Vortigern's invitation was accepted by Hengist and Horsa, two chiefs of Jutish blood, who came with their war-bands to the aid of the Britons, and drove away the Picts and Scots. But when the king of Kent wished to pay them their due and get them out of the country, Hengist and Horsa refused to depart: they seized and fortified the Isle of Thanet, which was then separated from the mainland by a broad marshy channel, and defied the Britons to drive them away (449). Then began a long war between the two sea-kings and their late employer, which, after many vicissitudes, ended in the conquest of the whole of Kent by Hengist. Horsa had been slain in the battle of Aylesford, which gave the invaders full possession of the land between the forest of the Weald and the estuary of the Thames. Hengist was saluted as king by his victorious followers, and was the ancestor of a long line of Kentish monarchs.

We cannot be sure that the details of the story of the conquest of Kent are correct, but they are not unlikely, and it is quite probable that this kingdom was the first state which the Germans built up on British ground.

[Sidenote: =Aella, 477.--Kingdom of the South Saxons.=]

Hengist and Horsa's warriors were not Saxons, but members of the tribe of the Jutes, who dwelt north of the Saxons in the Danish peninsula, where a land of moors and lakes still bears the name of Jutland. But the next band of invaders who seized on part of Britain were of Saxon blood. An "alderman" or chief called Aella brought his war-band to the southern shore of Britain in 477, and landed near the great fortress of Anderida (Pevensey), one of the strongholds that had, in old days, been under the care of the Roman "count of the Saxon shore." The followers of Aella sacked this town, and slew off every living thing that was therein. They went on to conquer the narrow slip of land between the sea and the forest of the Weald, as far as Chichester and Selsea, and made the chalky downs their own. Settling down thereon, they called themselves the South Saxons, and the district got from them the name of Sussex (Suth Seaxe). There Aella reigned as king, and many of his obscure descendants after him.

[Sidenote: =Cerdic, 495.--Kingdom of the West Saxons.=]

Twenty years later, another band of Saxon adventurers, led by the alderman Cerdic, landed on Southampton Water, west of the realm of Aella (495), and, after a hard fight with the Britons, won the valleys of the Itchen and the Test with the old Roman town of Venta (Winchester). Many years after his first landing, Cerdic took the title of king, like his neighbours of Kent and Sussex, and his realm became known as the land of the West Saxons (Wessex). Gradually pushing onward along the ridges of the downs, successive generations of the kings of Wessex drove the Britons out of Dorsetshire and Wiltshire till the line of conquest stopped at the forest-belt which lay east of Bath. Here the advance stood still for a time, for the British kings of the Damnonians, the tribes of Devon and Cornwall, made a most obstinate defence. So gallant was it that the Celts of a later generation believed that the legendary hero of their race, the great King Arthur, had headed the hosts of Damnonia in person, and placed his city of Camelot and his grave at Avilion within the compass of the western realm.

[Sidenote: =Kingdom of the East Saxons.=]

While Cerdic was winning the downs of Hampshire for himself, another band of Saxon warriors had landed on the northern shore of the Thames, and subdued the low-lying country between the old Roman towns of Camulodunum and Londinium, from the Colne as far as the Stour. This troop of adventurers took the name of the East Saxons, and were the last of their race to gain a footing on the British shores.

[Sidenote: =Kingdom of East Anglia, 520.=]

North of Essex it was no longer the Saxons who took up the task of conquest, but a kindred tribe, the Angles or English, who dwelt originally between the Saxons and the Jutes, in the district which is now called Schleswig. They were closely allied in blood and language to the earlier invaders of Britain, and very probably their chiefs may have aided in the earlier raids. About the year 520 the Angles descended in force on the eastern shore of Britain, and two of their war-bands established themselves in the land where the Celtic tribe of the Iceni had dwelt. These two bands called themselves the North Folk and South Folk, and from them the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk get their names. The kingdom formed by their union was known as that of the East Angles.

[Sidenote: =The Northumbrian kingdoms, 547-550.=]

Still further to the north new Anglian bands seized on the lands north of the Humber, whence they obtained the name of Northumbrians. They built up two kingdoms in the old region of the Brigantes. One, from Forth to Tees, was called Bernicia, from Bryneich, the old Celtic name of the district. It comprised only a strip along the shore, reaching no further inland than the forest of Selkirk and the head-waters of the Tyne; its central stronghold was the sea-girt rock of Bamborough. The second Northumbrian kingdom was called Deira, a name derived, like that of Bernicia, from the former Celtic appellation of the land. Deira comprised the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, and centred round the old Roman city of Eboracum, whose name the Angles corrupted into Eofervic. The origin of Bernicia and Deira is ascribed to the years 547-550, so that northern Britain was not subdued by the invaders till a century after Kent had fallen into their hands.

[Sidenote: =The kingdom of Mercia.=]

Last of the English realms was established the great midland state of Mercia--the "March" or borderland. It was formed by the combination of three or four Anglian war-bands, who must have cut their way into the heart of Britain up the line of the Trent. Among these bodies of adventurers were the Lindiswaras--the troop who had won the old Roman city of Lindum, or Lincoln,--the Mid-Angles of Leicester, and the Mercians strictly so-called, who held the foremost line of advance against the Celts in the modern counties of Derby and Stafford. The Britons still maintained themselves at Deva and Uriconium (Chester and Wroxeter), two ancient Roman strongholds, and the Mercians had not yet reached the Severn at any point.

[Sidenote: =The Britons in the west.=]

About 570, therefore, after a hundred and twenty years of hard fighting, the Angles and Saxons had conquered about one-half of Britain, but they were stopped by a line of hills and forests running down the centre of the island, and did not yet touch the western sea at any point. Behind this barrier dwelt the unsubdued Britons, who were styled by the English the "Welsh," or "foreigners," though they called themselves the Kymry, or "comrades." They were, now as always, divided into several kingdoms whose chiefs were perpetually at war, and failed most lamentably to support each other against the English invader. The most important of these kingdoms were Cumbria in the north, between the Clyde and Ribble, Gwynedd in North Wales, and Damnonia in Devon and Cornwall. Now and again prominent chiefs from one or other of these three realms succeeded in forcing their neighbours to combine against the Saxon enemy, and styled themselves lords of all the Britons, but the title was precarious and illusory. The Celts could never learn union or wisdom.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Deorham, 577.=]

The line of the British defence was at last broken in two points, and the Saxons and Angles pushed through till they touched the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. The first of the conquerors of Western Britain was Ceawlin, king of Wessex. After winning the southern midlands by a victory at Bedford in 571 he pushed along the upper Thames, and attacked the Welsh of the lower Severn. At a great battle fought at Deorham, in Gloucestershire, in 577, he slew the kings of Glevum, Corinium, and Aquae Sulis (Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath). All their realms fell into his hands, and so the West Saxons won their way to the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and cut off the Celts of Damnonia from the Celts of South Wales.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Chester, 613.=]

A generation later, in the year 613, Aethelfrith the Northumbrian, king of Bernicia and Deira, made a similar advance westward. In a great battle at Deva (Chester) he defeated the allied princes of Cumbria and North Wales. This fight was long remembered because of the massacre of a host of monks who had come to supplicate Heaven for the victory of the Celts over the pagan English. "If they do not fight against us with their arms, they do so with their prayers," said the Northumbrian king, and bade his warriors cut them all down. The city of Deva was sacked, and remained a mere ring of mouldering Roman walls for three centuries. The district round it became English, and thus the Cumbrians were separated from the North Welsh by a belt of hostile territory.

The battles of Chester and Deorham settled the future of Britain; the Celts became comparatively helpless when they had been cut into three distinct sections, in Cumbria, Wales, and Damnonia. The future of the island now lay in the hands of the English, not in that of the ancient inhabitants of Britain.

[Sidenote: =The invaders and the natives.=]

The states which the invaders had built up were, as might have been inferred from their origin, small military monarchies. The basis of each had been the war-band that followed some successful "alderman," for the invaders were not composed of whole tribes emigrating en masse, but of the more adventurous members of the race only. The bulk of the Saxons and Jutes remained behind on the continent in their ancient homes, and so did many of the Angles. When the successful chief had conquered a district of Britain and assumed the title of king, he would portion the land out among his followers, reserving a great share for his own royal demesne. Each of the king's sworn companions, or gesiths as the old English called them, became the centre of a small community of dependents--his children, servants, and slaves. At first the invaders often slew off the whole Celtic population of a valley, but ere long they found the convenience of reducing them to slavery and forcing them to till the land for their new masters. In eastern Britain and during the first days of the conquest the natives were often wholly extirpated, but in the central and still more in the western part of the island they were allowed to survive as serfs, and thus there is much Celtic blood in England down to this day. But this native element was never strong enough to prevail over and absorb the conquerors, as happened to the Goths of Spain and the Franks of Gaul, who finally lost their language and their national identity among the preponderant mass of their own dependents.

As the conquest of Britain went on, many families who had not been in the war-band of the original invader came in to join the first settlers, and to dwell among them, so that the king had many English subjects besides his original gesiths. Some of the villages in his dominions would therefore be inhabited by the servile dependents of one of these early-coming military chiefs, others by the free bands of kinsmen who had drifted in of their own accord to settle in the land. When we see an English village with a name like Saxmundham, or Edmonton, or Wolverton, we may guess that the place was originally the homestead of a lord named Saxmund, or Eadmund, or Wulfhere, and his dependents. But when it has a name like Buckingham, or Paddington, or Gillingham, we know that it was the common settlement of a family, the Buckings or the Paddings or the Gillings, for the termination -ing in old English invariably implied a body of descendants from common ancestors.

[Sidenote: =Administration--Aldermen and shire-reeves.=]

The early English states were administered under the king by aldermen, or military chiefs, to each of whom was entrusted the government of one of the various regions of the kingdom, and by reeves, who were responsible for the royal property and dues, each in his own district. The larger kingdoms, such as Wessex, were soon cut up into shires, each with its alderman and shire-reeve (sheriff), and many of these shires exist down to our own day.

[Sidenote: =The king and the witan.=]

The supreme council of the realm was formed by the king, the aldermen, and a certain number of the greater gesiths who served about the king's person. The king and great men discussed subjects of national moment, while the people sat round and shouted assent or dissent to their speeches. The king did not take any measure of importance without the advice of his councillors, who were known as the Witan, or Wise-men. When a king died, or ruled tyrannically, or became incompetent, it was the Witan who chose a new monarch from among the members of the royal family, for there was as yet no definite rule of hereditary succession, and the kingship was elective, though the Witan never went outside the limits of the royal house in their nominations.

[Sidenote: =The shire-moot and tun-moot.=]

The smaller matters of import in an old English kingdom were settled at the shire-moot, or meeting of all the freemen of a shire. There, once a month, the aldermen and reeve of the district called up the freeholders who dwelt in it, and by their aid settled disputes and lawsuits. Each freeman had his vote, so the shire-court was a much more democratic body than the Witan, where only great lords and officials could speak and give their suffrages.

Matters too small for the shire-moot were settled by the meeting of the villagers in their own petty tun-moot, which every freeman would attend. Here would be decided disputes between neighbours, as to their fields and cattle. Such cases would be numerous because, in the early settlements of the English, the ploughed fields and the pasture grounds of the village were both great unenclosed tracts with no permanent boundaries. Every man owned his house and yard, but the pasture and the waste land and woods around belonged to the community, and not to the individual.

[Sidenote: =Gradual growth of towns.=]

The early English were essentially dwellers in the open country. They did not at first know how to deal with the old Roman towns, but simply plundered and burnt them, and allowed them to crumble away. They thought the deserted ruins were the homes of ghosts and evil spirits, and were not easily induced to settle near them. Even great towns like Canterbury and London and Bath seem to have lain waste for a space, between their destruction by the first invaders and their being again peopled. But ere long the advantages of the sites, and the abundance of building material which the old Roman buildings supplied, tempted the English back to the earlier centres of population. We can trace the ancient origin of many of our towns by their names: the English added the word -chester or -caster to the name of the places which were built on Roman sites--a word derived, of course, from the Latin castra. So Winchester and Rochester and Dorchester and Lancaster are shown to be old Roman towns rebuilt, but not founded by the new-comers.

[Sidenote: =Religion.=]

In religion the old English were pure polytheists, worshipping the ancient gods of their German ancestors, Woden, the wise father of heaven, and Thunder (Thor), the god of storm and strength, and Balder, the god of youth and spring, and many more. But they were not an especially religious people; they had few temples and priests, and did not allow their superstition to influence their life or their politics to any great extent. We shall see that in a later age most of them deserted their pagan worship without much regret and after but a short struggle. It was more a matter of ancestral custom to them than a very fervent belief. It is noticeable that very few places in England get their names from the old gods; but we find a few, such as Wednesbury (Woden's-burh) or Thundersfield, or Balderston, scattered over the face of the country.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. THE CONVERSION OF BRITAIN AND THE RISE OF WESSEX

597-836.

After the battles of Deorham and Chester had broken the strength of the Britons, and all central Britain had fallen into English hands, the victorious invaders did not persevere in completing the conquest of the island, but turned to contend with each other. For the next two hundred years the history of England is the history of the conflict of the three larger kingdoms--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--for the supremacy and primacy in the island. First one, then the other obtained a mastery over its rivals, but the authority of an English king who claimed to be "Bretwalda," or paramount lord of Britain, was as vague and precarious as that of the Celtic chiefs who in an earlier age had asserted a similar domination over their tribal neighbours.

Both Ceawlin the victor of Deorham, and Aethelfrith the victor of Chester, were great conquerors in their own day, and are said to have claimed an over-lordship over their neighbours. But about the year 595, when the one was dead and the other had not yet risen, the chief king of Britain was Aethelbert of Kent, a warlike young monarch who subdued his neighbours of Sussex and Essex, and aspired to extend his influence all over the island.

[Sidenote: =Augustine, 597.--Conversion of Kent.=]

To the court of this King Aethelbert there came, in the year 597, an embassy from beyond the high seas, which was destined to change the whole course of the history of England. It was led by the monk Augustine, and was composed of a small band of missionaries from Rome, who had set out in the hope of converting the English to Christianity. Twenty years before there had been a pious abbot in Rome named Gregory, who had earnestly desired to go forth to preach the gospel to the English. The well-known legend tells how he once saw exposed in the market for sale some young boys of a fair countenance. "Who are these children?" he asked of the slave-dealer. "Heathen Angles," was the reply. "Truly they have the faces of angels," said Gregory. "And whence have they been brought?" "From the kingdom of Deira," he was told. "Indeed, they should be brought de ira Dei, out from the land of the wrath of God," was the abbot's punning rejoinder. From that day Gregory strove to set forth for Britain, but circumstances always stood in his way. At last he became pope, and when he had gained this position of authority, he determined that he would send others, if he could not go himself, to care for the souls of the pagan English.

So in 596 he sent out the zealous monk Augustine, with a company of priests and others, to seek out the land of England. Augustine landed in Kent, both because King Aethelbert was the greatest chief in Britain, and because he had taken as his queen a Christian lady from Gaul, Bertha, the daughter of Charibert, king of Paris. So Augustine and his fellows came to Canterbury to the court of the king, and when Aethelbert saw them he asked his wife what manner of men they might be. When she had pleaded for them, he looked upon them kindly, and gave them the ruined Roman church of St. Martin outside the gates of Canterbury, and told them that they might preach freely to all his subjects. So Augustine dwelt in Kent, and taught the Kentishmen the truths of Christianity till many of them accepted the gospel and were baptized. Ere long King Aethelbert himself was converted, and when he had declared himself a Christian most of his gesiths and nobles followed him to the font. Then Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and his companion Mellitus Bishop of Rochester, and the kingdom of Kent became a part of Christendom once more.

Ere very long the kings of the East Saxons and East Angles, who were vassals to Aethelbert, declared that they also were ready to accept the gospel. They were baptized with many of their subjects, but Christianity was not yet very firmly rooted among them. When King Aethelbert died, and was succeeded by his son, who was a heathen and an evil liver, a great portion of the men who so easily accepted Christianity fell back into paganism again. They had conformed to please the king, not because they had appreciated the truths of the gospel. East Anglia and Essex relapsed almost wholly from the faith, and had to be reconverted a generation later; but in Kent Augustine's work had been more thorough, and after a short struggle the whole kingdom finally became Christian.

[Sidenote: =Conversion and prosperity of Eadwine of Northumbria.=]

From Kent the true faith was conveyed to the English of the North. Eadwine, King of Northumbria, married a daughter of Aethelbert and Bertha. She was a Christian, and brought with her to York a Roman chaplain named Paulinus, one of the disciples of Augustine. By the exhortations of this Paulinus, King Eadwine was led toward Christianity. He was a great warrior, and while he was doubting as to the faith, it chanced that he had to set forth on an expedition against his enemy, the King of Wessex. Then he vowed that if the God of the Christians gave him victory and he should return in peace, he would be baptized. The campaign was successful, and Eadwine went joyfully to the baptismal font. It was long remembered how he held council with his Witan, urging them to leave darkness for light, and doubt for certainty. Then, because they had found little help in their ancient gods, and because the heathen faith gave them no good guidance for this life, and no good hope of a better life to come, the great men of Northumbria swore that they would follow their king. Coifi, the high priest, was the first to cast down his own idols and destroy the great temple of York, and with him the nobles and gesiths of Eadwine went down to the water and were all baptized (627).

For some time King Eadwine prospered greatly; he became the chief king of Britain, and made the East Angles and East Saxons his vassals. He destroyed the Welsh kingdom of Leeds, and added the West Riding of Yorkshire to the Northumbrian kingdom. He also smote the Picts beyond the Forth, and built a fleet on the Irish sea with which he reduced the isles of Man and Anglesea.

[Sidenote: =Defeat and death of Eadwine.--Reaction against Christianity.=]

Eadwine's conquests roused all his neighbours against him, and in their common fear of the Northumbrian sword, English and Welsh princes were for the first time found joining in alliance. Penda, King of Mercia, an obstinate heathen and a great foe of the gospel, leagued himself with Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, the greatest of the Christian chiefs of Wales. Together they beset the realm of Eadwine, and the great King of Northumbria fell in battle with all his host, at Heathfield, near Doncaster (632).

The Welsh and Mercians overran Northumbria after slaying its king, and Cadwallon took York and burnt it. The Northumbrians thought that Eadwine's God had been found wanting in the day of battle, and most of them relapsed into paganism in their despair. Paulinus, who had become the first Bishop of York, had to flee away into Kent, the only kingdom where Christians were safe for the moment.

[Sidenote: =The Irish missionaries.--Columba.=]

But ere very long the Northumbrians were saved from their despair. Eadwine and the ancient stock of the kings of Deira were swept away, but there were two princes alive of the royal house of Bernicia. Their names were Oswald and Oswiu, and during Eadwine's reign they had been living in exile. Their abode had been among those of the Scots who had crossed over from Ireland and settled on the coast of northern Britain, in the land which now bears their name. There the two brethren had fallen in with the disciples of the good Abbot Columba, the founder of the great monastery of Iona, and from them they had learnt the Christian faith. Columba, whose successors were to convert all the north of England, had been a man of great mark. He was an Irish monk who had left his own land in self-imposed exile, because he had been the cause of a tribal war among his countrymen. Crossing to the Argyleshire coast, he built a monastery on the lonely island of Iona, and from thence laboured for the conversion of the Picts and Scots.

[Sidenote: =Oswald, King of Northumbria.--Christianity restored.=]

When Oswald heard of the desperate condition of Northumbria after Eadwine's death, he resolved to go to the aid of his countrymen against the Welsh and Mercians. So he went southward with a few companions, and raised the Bernicians against their oppressors, setting up as his standard the cross that he had learnt to reverence in Iona. His effort was crowned with success, and at the Heavenfield, near the Roman wall, he completely defeated the Welsh and slew their king Cadwallon. Penda the Mercian was driven out of Northumbria also, and for eight years (634-642) Oswald maintained himself as king of all the land between Forth and Trent. He used his power most zealously for the propagation of Christianity. He sent to Iona for two pious monks, Aidan and Finan, who were successively bishops of York under him, and by their aid he so drew his people toward the faith of Christ that they never swerved from it again, as they had done after the death of Eadwine. Oswald also encouraged missionaries to go into the other English kingdoms. It was by his advice that Birinus went from Rome to Wessex, where he converted King Cynegils, and founded the bishopric of Dorchester-on-Thames.

[Sidenote: =Penda, King of Mercia.--Battle of Maserfield, 642.=]

But Oswald was not strong enough to put down his heathen neighbour, Penda, the King of Mercia, a mighty warrior who united all the English of central Britain under his sceptre, slaying the kings of the East Angles, and tearing away Gloucester and all the land of the Hwiccas[3] from the kings of Wessex. Penda and Oswald were constantly at war, and at last the Mercian slew the Northumbrian at the battle of Maserfield, in Shropshire, near Oswestry (642).

[Sidenote: =Oswiu, King of Northumbria.--Conversion of Mercia.=]

But the good King Oswald left a worthy successor in his brother Oswiu, as zealous a Christian and as vigorous a ruler as himself. Oswiu defeated Penda at the battle of the Winweed, and by slaying the slayer became the over-king of all England. He conquered the Picts between Forth and Tay, made the Welsh and the Cumbrians pay him tribute, and annexed northern Mercia, giving the rest of the kingdom over to Peada, Penda's son, only when he became a Christian. It was all over with the cause of heathenism when Penda fell, and the Mercians and their king bowed to the conquering faith, and listened to the preaching of Ceadda, one of the Northumbrian monks who had been taught by the Irish missionaries Aidan and Finan.

[Sidenote: =Dissensions of Irish and Roman clergy.--Council at Whitby, 664.=]

Mercia and Northumbria, therefore, owed their conversion to the disciples of Columba, and looked to the monastery of Iona as the source of their Christianity, while Kent and Wessex looked to Rome, from whence had come Augustine and Birinus. Unhappily there arose dissension between the clergy of the two churches, for the converts of the Irish monks thought that the South English paid too much deference to Rome, and differed from them on many small points of practice, such as the proper day for keeping Easter, and the way in which priests should cut their hair. King Oswiu was grievously vexed at these quarrels, and held a council at Whitby, or Streonshalch as it was then called, to hear both sides state their case before him. He made his decision in favour of the Roman observance, and many of the Irish clergy withdrew in consequence from his kingdom, rather than conform to the ways of their Roman brethren. This submission of the English to the Papal see was destined to lead to many evils in later generations, but at the time it was far the better alternative. If they had decided to adhere to the Irish connection, they would have stood aside from the rest of Western Christendom, and sundered themselves from the fellowship of Christian nations, and the civilizing influences of which Rome was then the centre (664).

[Sidenote: =Archbishop Theodore.--Unification of the Church in Britain.=]

The English Church, being thus united in communion with Rome, received as Archbishop of Canterbury a Greek monk named Theodore of Tarsus, whom Pope Vitalian recommended to them. It was this Theodore who first organized the Church of England into a united whole; down to his day the missionaries who worked in the different kingdoms had nothing to do with each other. But now all England was divided into bishoprics, which all paid obedience to the metropolitan see of Canterbury; and in each bishopric the countryside was furnished with clergy to work under the bishop. Some have said that Theodore cut up England into parishes, each served by a resident priest, but things had not advanced quite so far by his day. Under Theodore and his successors the bishops and clergy of all the kingdoms frequently met in councils and synods, so that England was united into a spiritual whole long before she gained political unity. It was first in these church meetings that Mercian, West Saxon, and Northumbrian learnt to meet as friends and equals, to work for the common good of them all.

[Sidenote: =Prosperity of the Church.--Winfrith.--Baeda-Alcuin.=]

The English Church was vigorous from the very first. Ere it had been a hundred years in existence it had begun to produce men of such wisdom and piety, that England was considered the most saintly land of Western Christendom. It sent out the missionaries who rescued Germany from heathenism--Willibrord, the apostle of Frisia; Suidbert, who converted Hesse; above all the great Winfrith (or Boniface), the first Archbishop of Mainz. This great man, the friend and adviser of the Frankish ruler Charles Martel, spread the gospel all over Central Germany, and organized a national church in the lands on the Main and Saal, where previously Woden and his fellows alone had been worshipped. He died a martyr among the heathen of the Frisian Marshes in 733.

Nor was the English Church less noted for its men of learning. Not only were they well versed in Latin, which was the common language of the clergy all over Europe, but some of them were skilled in Greek also, for the good Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus had instructed many in his native tongue. Among the old English scholars two deserve special mention: one is the Northumbrian Baeda (the Venerable Bede), a monk of Jarrow, who translated the Testament from Greek into English, and also wrote an ecclesiastical history of England which is our chief source for the knowledge of his times (d. 735); the second was another Northumbrian, Alcuin of York, whose knowledge was so celebrated all over Europe that the Emperor Charles the Great sent for him to Aachen, the Frankish capital, and made him his friend and tutor; for Charles ardently loved all manner of learning, and could find no one like Alcuin among his own people.

[Sidenote: =Reign of Ecgfrith.--Decline of Northumbria.=]

As long as Oswiu and his son Ecgfrith lived, Northumbria held the foremost place among the English kingdoms, and its rulers were accounted the chief kings of Britain. Ecgfrith conquered Carlisle and Cumbria from the Welsh, and even invaded Ireland, but in an attempt to add the highlands beyond the Forth to his realm, he was slain in battle by the Picts at Nechtansmere (685). With his death the greatness of Northumbria passed away, for his successors were weak men, and after a while grew so powerless that the kingdom was vexed by constant civil wars, and became the prey of its neighbours, the Mercians on the south, and the Picts and Scots on the north.

[Sidenote: =Supremacy of Mercia, 675-796.--Reign of Offa.=]

The supremacy that had once been in the hands of the Northumbrians now passed away to the kings of Mercia, the largest and most central of the English kingdoms. Three great kings of that realm, Aethelred, Aethelbald and Offa, whose reigns occupied almost the whole of the period from 675 to 796, were all in their day reckoned as supreme lords of England. The rulers of East Anglia, Essex, and Kent were counted as their vassals, and they deprived Wessex of its dominions north of the Thames, and Northumbria of all that it had held south of the Trent and the Ribble. Offa pushed his boundary far to the west, into the lands of the Welsh; and, after conquering the valleys of the Wye and the upper Severn, drew a great dyke from sea to sea, reaching from near Chester on the north to Chepstow on the south; it marked the boundary between the English and the Cymry for three hundred years. Offa was the greatest king whom England had yet seen, and corresponded on equal terms with Charles the Great, the famous King of the Franks, who was his firm friend and ally (757-796).

[Sidenote: =Decline of Mercia.=]

Nevertheless, after Offa's day the sceptre passed away from Mercia, and his successors saw their vassal kings rebel and disown the Mercian allegiance. To maintain subject states in obedience was always a very hard task for the old English kings, because they had no standing armies, and no system of fortification. When a neighbouring realm was overrun by the tumultuary army of a victorious king, he had to be satisfied with the homage of its people, because he could not build fortresses in it, or leave a standing force to hold it down. The only way of keeping a conquest was to colonize it, as was done with the lands taken from the Welsh; but the English kings shrank from evicting their own kinsfolk, and seldom or never employed this device against them. Hence it always happened that, when a great king died, his vassals at once rebelled, and unless his successor was a man of ability he was unable to reconquer them.

[Sidenote: =Supremacy of Wessex.--Ecgbert, 800-836.=]

From Mercia the primacy among the English states passed to Wessex, a state which had hitherto kept much to itself, and had busied itself in conquering land from the Welsh of Damnonia, rather than in striving with its English neighbours for the supremacy in mid-Britain. Wessex, indeed, had lost to the Mercians all its territory north of the Thames, and was now a purely south-country state. Its borders reached to the Tamar and the Cornish moors, since the days when Taunton in 710 and Exeter in 705 had fallen into the hands of its kings.

The West-Saxon king who succeeded to the power of Offa was Ecgbert, the ancestor of all the subsequent monarchs of Britain down to our own day.[4] He was a prince who had seen many troubles in his youth, having been driven over sea by his kinsman and forced to take refuge with Charles the Great. He spent some years in the court and army of the Frankish monarch, but was called to the throne of Wessex in 800, on the death of his unfriendly cousin. In a long reign that lasted for thirty-six years, Ecgbert not only subdued the small kingdoms of Kent and Sussex, and made the Welsh princes of Cornwall do him homage, but he even dared at last to attack his powerful neighbours the Mercians. At the battle of Ellandun, in Wiltshire (823), he defeated and slew King Beornwulf, the unworthy heir of Offa's greatness. Shortly after Mercia did him homage, and the Northumbrians, sorely vexed by civil wars, soon followed the example of their southern neighbours.

Thus Ecgbert became over-lord of Britain, in the same sense that Eadwine and Offa had previously held the title. But the dominion of the kings of Wessex was destined to be of a more enduring nature than that of their predecessors. This was not so much due to their own abilities as to the changed condition of the state of England. Not only were there strong tendencies arising towards unity within the English realms--due most especially to the influence of their common Church--but pressure from without was now about to be applied in a way that forced the English to combine.

Before Ecgbert had come to the throne, and even before Offa was dead, the first signs had been seen of the coming storm that was to sweep over England in the second half of the ninth century. The Danes had already begun to appear off the coasts of the island.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The Hwiccas held the lands conquered by Ceawlin on the lower Severn, the modern counties of Worcester and Gloucester.

[4] All kings, both Anglo-Saxon and Norman, since 820, descend from Ecgbert save Cnut, the two Harolds, and William I. The Conqueror's wife, Matilda of Flanders, had English blood in her veins, so William is the only exception in his line.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. THE DANISH INVASIONS, AND THE GREAT KINGS OF WESSEX

The English chronicles have accurately fixed for us the date of the first raid of the Northmen. In 787, three strange ships were seen off the Dorsetshire coast. From them landed a small band of marauders, who sacked the port of Wareham, and then hastily put to sea and vanished from sight. This insignificant descent was only the first of a series of dreadful ravages. A few years later, in 793, a greater band descended on Lindisfarne, the holy island of St. Cuthbert off the Bernician coast, the greatest and richest monastery of northern England. Thenceforth raids came thick and fast, till at last the sword of the invaders had turned half England into a desert.

[Sidenote: =The Vikings.=]

The people of Scandinavia were at this moment in much the same state of development in which the English had been three centuries before, ere yet they left the shores of Saxony and Schleswig. The Danes and Norwegians were a hardy seafaring race, divided into many small kingdoms, always at war with each other. They were still wild heathens, and practised piracy as the noblest occupation for warriors and freemen. Just as Hengist and Aella had sailed out with their war-bands in search of plunder and land in the fifth century, so the chiefs of the Northmen were now preparing to lead out their followers into the western seas. For two centuries the onslaughts of the Vikings--as these piratical hordes were called--were fated to be the curse of Christendom. The Vikings in their early days were led, not by the greater kings of Denmark and Norway, but by leaders chosen by the pirate bands for their military abilities. Such chiefs were obeyed on the battle-field alone; off it they were treated with small respect by their comrades. There were dozens of these sea-kings on the water, each competing with the others for the largest following that he could get together.

[Sidenote: =Their raids grow more permanent.=]

The Northmen were at first seeking for nothing more than plunder. Western Christendom offered them a great field, because the Franks, English, and Irish of the ninth century almost all dwelt in open towns, had very few forts and castles, and had built enormous numbers of rich defenceless monasteries and churches. The Dane landed near a wealthy port or abbey, sacked it, and hastily took to sea again, before the countryside had time to muster in arms against him.

But after a time the continued successes of their first raids encouraged the Northmen to take the field in much greater numbers, so that fleets of a hundred ships, with eight or ten thousand men aboard them, were found sailing under some noted sea-king. When they grew so strong they took to making raids deeper into the land, boldly facing the force of an English shire or a Frankish county if they were brought to bay. When numbers were equal they generally had the advantage in the fray, for they were all trained warriors, and were fighting for their lives. Against them came only a rustic militia fresh from the plough. If beset by the overwhelming strength of a whole kingdom, they fortified themselves on a headland, an island, or a marsh-girt palisade, and held out till the enemy melted homeward for lack of provisions.

[Sidenote: =Sufferings of Northumbria and Mercia.--Reign of Aethelwulf.=]

As long as Ecgbert lived he kept the Danes away from his kingdom of Wessex, dealing them heavy blows whenever they dared to march inland. The greatest of these victories was one gained at Hengistesdun (Hingston Down), near Plymouth, over the combined forces of the Danes and the revolted Welsh of Cornwall (835). But though he was able to protect his own realm, Ecgbert was unable to care for his Mercian and Northumbrian vassals; they were too far off, and his authority over them was too weak. So northern England was already suffering fearfully from the Viking raids even before Ecgbert died. His son Aethelwulf, who succeeded him as king of Wessex, was a pious easy-going man, destitute of his father's strength and ability. If the Mercians and Northumbrians had not been so desperately afflicted at the moment by the ravages of the Vikings, they would have undoubtedly taken the opportunity to throw off the yoke of the Wessex kings. But their troubles made them cautious of adding civil war to foreign invasion, and so Aethelwulf was allowed to keep his father's nominal suzerainty over the whole of England. More than once he led a West-Saxon army up to aid the Mercians, but he could not be everywhere at the same time, and while he was protecting one point, the Danes would slip round by sea and attack another. Wessex itself was no longer secure from their incursions, and the chronicles record several disastrous raids carried out on its coast.

All through King Aethelwulf's reign (836-858) the state of England was growing progressively worse. Commerce was at a standstill, many of the larger towns had been burnt by the Danes, the greatest of the monasteries had been destroyed, and their monks slain or scattered; with them perished the wealth and the learning which had made the English Church the pride of Western Christendom. The land was beginning to sink back into poverty and barbarism, and there seemed to be no hope left to the English, for the Viking armies grew larger and bolder every year.

[Sidenote: =The Danes threaten permanent occupation.=]

After a time the invaders began to aim at something more than transitory raids; they took to staying over the winter in England, instead of returning to Norway or Denmark. Fortifying themselves in strong posts like the isles of Thanet or Sheppey, they defied King Aethelwulf to dislodge them. In a very short time it was evident that they would think of permanently occupying Britain, just as the Saxons and Angles had done three centuries back.

Aethelwulf, in great distress of mind, made a pilgrimage to Rome, and obtained the Pope's blessing for his efforts. But he fared none the better for that. It was equally in vain that he tried to concert measures for common defence with his neighbour across the Channel, King Charles the Bald, whose daughter Judith he took to wife. The Frankish king was even more vexed by the pirates than Aethelwulf himself, and no help was got from him.

[Sidenote: =Deposition of Aethelwulf, 856.--Winchester burnt, 864.=]

The men of Wessex at last grew so discontented with Aethelwulf's weak rule that the Witan deposed him, and elected his son Aethelbald king in his stead (856). But they left the small kingdoms of Kent and Sussex to the old man for the term of his natural life, to maintain him in his royal state. Aethelwulf died two years later, and after him reigned his three short-lived sons--Aethelbald (856-860), Aethelbert (860-866), and Aethelred (866-871).

The fifteen years, during which they ruled, proved a time of even greater misery and distress than the latter days of their father's troubled reign. The Danes not only penetrated into every nook and corner of Mercia and Northumbria, but even struck at the heart of Wessex, and burnt its capital, the ancient city of Winchester (864).

[Sidenote: =Conquest of Northumbria by the Danes.=]

But the sorest trial came two years later, in the time of King Aethelred. A vast confederacy of many Viking bands, which called itself the "Great Army," leagued themselves together and fell on England, no longer to plunder, but to subdue and occupy the whole land. Under two chiefs, called Ingwar and Hubba, they overran Northumbria in 867. The Northumbrians were divided by civil war, but the rival kings, Osbercht and Aella, joined their forces to resist the oncoming storm. Yet both of them were slain by the Danes in a great battle outside the gates of York, and the victors stormed and sacked the Northumbrian capital after the engagement. They then proceeded to divide up the land among themselves, and settled up all the old kingdom of Deira, from Tees to Trent. The English population was partly slain off, partly reduced to serfdom. So, after being for two hundred years a Christian kingdom, Deira became once more a community of wild heathen; the work of Oswald and Aidan seemed undone.

[Sidenote: =Conquest of East Anglia.=]

But the whole of the Danes of the "Great Army" could not find land in Deira. One division of them went off against the East Angles, under Jarl Ingwar, and fought a great battle with Edmund, the brave and pious king of that race. They took him prisoner, and when he would not do them homage or worship their gods, they shot him to death with arrows. His followers secretly buried his body, and raised over it a shrine which became the great abbey of St. Edmundsbury. East Anglia was then divided up among the victorious Danes, just as Yorkshire had been; but they did not settle down so thickly in the eastern counties as in the north, and the share of Danish blood in those districts is comparatively small (869).

[Sidenote: =The Danes checked in Wessex.--Battle of Ashdown, 870.=]

King Aethelred of Wessex had not been able to afford any practical help to his Northumbrian and East Anglian neighbours. It was now his own turn to face the storm which had overwhelmed the two northern realms. In 870 the "Great Army," now under two kings, Guthrum and Bagsaeg, sailed up the Thames and threw itself upon Surrey and Berks, the northern border of Wessex. Aethelred came out in haste against them, and with him marched his younger brother Alfred, the youngest of the four sons of the old Aethelwulf, a youth of eighteen, who now entered on his first campaign. The men of Wessex made a far sterner defence than had the armies of the other English kingdoms. The two warrior-brothers Aethelred and Alfred fought no less than six battles with the "Great Army" in the single year 871. The war raged all along the line of the chalk downs of Berkshire, as the Danes strove to force their way westward. At last the men of Wessex gave them a thorough beating at Ashdown, where the Etheling Alfred won the chief honour of the day. The defeated Vikings sought refuge in a stockaded camp at Reading, between the waters of the Thames and the Kennet. Aethelred could not dislodge them from this stronghold, and in a skirmish with one of their foraging parties at Merton, in Surrey, he received a mortal wound (871).

[Sidenote: =Alfred, King of Wessex, 871.=]

Wearied with six battles, the army of Wessex broke up, and the thegns sadly bore King Aethelred home, to bury him at Wimborne. His young brother, the Etheling Alfred, succeeded him, and took up the task of defending Wessex in its hour of sore distress. It was fortunate that such a great man was at hand to bear the burden, for never was it more likely than now that the English name would be utterly swept off the face of the earth. In spite of his youth Alfred was quite capable of facing any difficulty or danger. From his boyhood upward he had always shown great promise; when a young child, he had been sent by his father, Aethelwulf, to Rome, and there had attracted the notice of Pope Leo, who anointed him, and predicted that he should one day be a king. He was able and brave, like most of the descendants of Ecgbert, but he was also far above all men of his day in his desire for wisdom and learning, and from his earliest years was known as a lover of books and scholars. Seldom, if ever, did any king combine so much practical ability in war and governance with such a keen taste for literature and science.

[Sidenote: =He makes peace with, the Danes.--Conquest of Mercia.=]

Alfred had short space to mourn his dead brother. The "Great Army" soon forced its way up from the Thames into Wiltshire, and beat the men of Wessex at Wilton. Then Alfred gave them great store of treasure to grant him peace, and they--since they found that the winning of Wessex cost so many hard blows--consented to turn aside for a space. But it was only in order to throw themselves on the neighbouring realm of Mercia. They dealt with it as they had already done with Deira and East Anglia. They defeated Burgred, its king, who fled away over sea and died at Rome; and then they took eastern Mercia and parcelled it out among themselves, while they gave its western half to an unwise thegn called Ceolwulf, who consented to be their vassal and proffered them a great tribute. It was not long, however, before they chased away him also. Now it was that there arose the great Danish towns in Mercia--Derby, Stamford, Leicester, Lincoln, and Nottingham, which, under the name of the "Five Boroughs," played a considerable part in English history for the next two centuries (876).

[Sidenote: =Renewed invasion of Wessex.=]

When Mercia had fallen, the Vikings turned once more against their old foes in Wessex. If only they could break down King Alfred's defences, they saw that the whole isle of Britain would be their own. So under the two kings, Guthrum and Hubba, they once more pushed southward beyond the Thames. There followed two years of desperate fighting (877-878). At first the invaders swept all before them. They took London, the greatest port of England, and Winchester, the capital of Wessex. Alfred, repeatedly beaten in battle, was forced westward, and driven to take refuge almost alone in the isle of Athelney, a marsh-girt spot in Somersetshire, between the Tone and the Parret. This was the scene of the celebrated legend of the burnt cakes. A curious memorial of Alfred's stay in Athelney is to be seen at Oxford--a gold and enamel locket bearing his name,[5] which was dug up in the island some nine hundred years after it was dropped by the wandering king.

[Sidenote: =Defeat of the Danes.--Treaty of peace.=]

While Alfred was in hiding, the Danes ranged all over Wessex; King Guthrum settled down at a fortified camp at Chippenham, in Wiltshire, while King Hubba ravaged Devon. But when all seemed in their power, they were suddenly disconcerted by a new gathering of the stubborn West Saxons. The men of Devon slew Hubba and took his raven banner, and then Alfred, issuing from Athelney, put himself at the head of the levies of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset, and made a desperate assault on Guthrum and the main body of the Danes. The king was victorious at Ethandun (Eddington), and drove the army of Guthrum into its stockade at Chippenham. There the Vikings were gradually forced by starvation to yield themselves up. Alfred granted them easy terms: if they would promise to quit Wessex for ever, and would swear homage to him as over-lord, and become Christians, he would grant them the lands of the East Angles and East Saxons to dwell in. Guthrum was fain to accept, so he was baptized, and received at Alfred's hands the new name of Aethelstan. Many of his host followed him to the font, and then they retired to East Anglia and dwelt therein, save those roving spirits who could not settle down anywhere. These latter went off to harry France, but King Guthrum and the majority abode in their new settlement, and were not such unruly or unfaithful subjects to Alfred as might have been expected from their antecedents.

In such troublous times it was not likely that Alfred would be free from other wars, but he came out of them all with splendid success. When new bands of Vikings assailed him in later years, he smote them again and again, and drove them out of the land. As a Norse poet once sang--

"They got hard blows instead of shillings, And the axe's weight instead of tribute;"

so they betook themselves elsewhere, to strive with less valiant kings beyond the seas.

[Sidenote: =Division of Britain.=]

By Alfred's agreement with Guthrum, England was divided into two halves, of which one was Danish and the other English. The old document called Alfred's and Guthrum's Frith gives the boundary of the Danelagh, or Danish settlement, thus: "Up the Lea and then across to Bedford, up the Ouse to Watling Street, and so along Watling Street to Chester." That is to say, that Northumbria and East Anglia and Essex, and the eastern half of Mercia, were left to the Danes, while Alfred reigned directly, not only over his own heritage of Wessex, Sussex, and Kent, but over western Mercia also. The nine counties[6] west of Watling Street became part of Wessex, so that Alfred's own kingdom came out of the Danish war much increased. Beyond its bounds he now had a nominal suzerainty over three Danish states, instead of four English ones. Guthrum reigned in the East, another Danish king at York, and between them lay the "Five Boroughs," which were independent of both kings, and were ruled by their own "jarls," as the Danes called their war-lords.

[Sidenote: =Danish rule in England.=]

The Danish rule in North-Eastern England was made comparatively light to the old inhabitants of the land when Guthrum and his men embraced Christianity. Instead of killing the people off or reducing them to slavery, the Danes now were content to take tribute from them, and to occupy a certain portion of their lands. The limit and extent of the Danish settlement can be well traced by studying the names of places in the northern counties. Wherever the invaders established themselves we find the Danish termination by in greater or less abundance. We find such names strewn thick about Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, less freely in Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and the eastern counties. Rugby, close to the line of Watling Street, is the Danish settlement that lies furthest into the heart of Mercia. The Viking blood, therefore, is largely mixed with the English in the valleys of the Trent and Ouse, and close to the eastern coast, and grows proportionately less as Watling Street is approached. The Danes took very easily to English manners; they had all turned Christians within a very few years, and their language was so like Old English that their speech soon became assimilated to that of their subjects, and could only be told from that of South England by differences of dialect that gradually grew less. In the end England gained rather than suffered by their invasion, for they brought much hardy blood into the land, and came to be good Englishmen within a very few generations.

[Sidenote: =Effects of the Danish wars.=]

But meanwhile, when they were but just settled down, and the land was still black with their burnings, England appeared in a sorry state, and Alfred the king had a hard task before him when he set to work to reform and reorganize his wasted realm. Well-nigh every town had been sacked and given to the flames at one time or another, during fifty years of war: the churches lay in ruins, the monasteries were deserted. Riches and learning had fled from the wasted land. "There was not one priest south of Thames," writes King Alfred himself, "who could properly understand the Latin of his own church-books, and very few in the whole of England." Moreover, the social condition of the people was rapidly becoming what we may style "feudalized"; that is, the smaller freeholders all over the country, unable to defend themselves from the Danes, were yielding themselves to be the "men" of their greater neighbours. This phrase implied that they surrendered their complete independence, and consented to pay the great men certain dues, and to follow them to the wars, and seek justice at their hands instead of from the free meeting of the village moot. The land still remained the peasant's own, but, instead of being personally free, he was now a dependent. It is noticeable that a similar state of things grew up from the same cause in every part of Western Europe during the ninth century.

[Sidenote: =Reforms of Alfred.--The royal power.--The army.=]

Finding himself confronted with this new condition of affairs, Alfred strengthened the royal power by compelling all these great lords to become his own sworn followers--gesiths, as they would have been called in an earlier age. But now the word was thegn, though the status was much the same. So all the great landholders of England became the king's "men," just as the villagers had become the men of the great landholders. The thegns served the king in bower and hall, and had to follow him in person whenever he took the field, as the old gesiths had followed the leaders of the first Saxon war-bands. They were a numerous body, and constituted a kind of standing army, since it was their duty to serve whenever their master went out to battle. The fyrd, or local militia of the villages, Alfred divided into two parts, one of which was always left at home to till the fields when the other half went out to war. It was at the head of his thegns and this reorganized fyrd that Alfred smote the Danes when they dared to invade his realm in his later years.

[Sidenote: =The laws.=]

Alfred has a great name as a law-giver, but he did more in the way of collecting and codifying the laws of the kings who were before him than in issuing new ordinances of his own. But since he made everything clear and orderly, the succeeding generations used to speak of the "laws of Alfred," when they meant the ancient statutes and customs of the realm.

[Sidenote: =Learning and civilization.=]

The most noteworthy, however, of Alfred's doings, if we consider the troublous times in which he lived, were his long-sustained and successful endeavours to restore the civilization of England, at which the Danish wars had dealt such a deadly blow. He collected scholars of note from the Continent, from Wales and Ireland, and founded schools to restore the lost learning for which England had been famed in the last century. His interest in literature of all kinds was very keen. He collected the old heroic epics of the English, all of which, save the poem of "Beowulf," have now perished, or survive only in small fragments. He compiled the celebrated "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," and left it behind him as a legacy to be continued by succeeding ages--as indeed it was for nearly three hundred years. He also translated Baeda's Latin history of England into the vernacular tongue, as well as Orosius' general history of the world. Nor was history the only province in which he took interest; he also caused Pope Gregory the Great's "Pastoral Care," and other theological works, to be done into English.

[Sidenote: =The navy.=]

Alfred may also be reckoned the father of the English navy. In order to cope with the ships of the Vikings, he built new war-vessels of larger size than any that had yet been seen in Western Europe, and provided that they should be well manned. He encouraged sailors to go on long voyages, and sent out the captain Othere, who sailed into the Arctic seas and discovered the North Cape. He was a friend of merchants, and it was probably to him that we may attribute the law which allowed any trader who fared thrice over-sea in his own ship to take the rank and privileges of a thegn.

We have no space to tell of the many other spheres of Alfred's activity, such as his church-building, his mechanical inventions, and his zeal in almsgiving and missionary work, which was so great that he even sent contributions to the distant Christians of St. Thomas in India. What heightens our surprise at the many-sided activity of the man is, that he was of a weakly constitution, and was often prostrated by the attacks of a periodical illness which clung to him from his youth up.

[Sidenote: =Renewed prosperity.--Alfred's successors.=]

Alfred lived till 901 in great peace and prosperity. He had increased the bounds of Wessex, saved England from the Dane, and brought her back to the foremost place among the peoples of Western Europe, for his Frankish contemporaries were sinking lower and lower amid the attacks of the Vikings, while England, under his care, was so rapidly recovering her strength. Even the Welsh, hostile hitherto to all who bore the English name, had done homage to him in 885, because they saw in him their only possible protection against the Dane.

Alfred's son and his three grandsons followed him on the throne in succession between the years 901 and 955. They were all brave, able, hard-working princes, the worthy offspring of such a progenitor. They carried out to the full the work that he had begun; while Alfred had checked the Danes and made them his vassals, his descendants completely subdued and incorporated them with the main body of the realm, so that they were no longer vassals, but direct subjects of the crown. And while Alfred had been over-king of England, his successors became over-kings of the whole isle of Britain, the suzerains of the Scots and the Welsh of Strathclyde, as well as of all the more southern peoples within the four seas.

[Sidenote: =Edward the Elder, 901-925.--Incorporation of central England with Wessex.=]

Alfred's eldest son and successor was Edward, generally called Edward the Elder to distinguish him from two later kings of his line. He was a wise and powerful king, whose life-work was the incorporation of central England, south of the Humber, with his realm of Wessex, by the complete conquest of the Danes of East Anglia and the Five Boroughs. When Alfred was dead, his Danish vassals tried to stir up trouble by raising up against Edward his cousin Aethelwulf, son of Aethelred. This pretender the new king drove out, and then, turning on the eastern Danes, slew their king Euric, the son of Guthrum-Aethelstan, and made them swear homage to him again.

But a few years later the Danes broke out again into rebellion, and Edward then took in hand their complete subjection. His chief helper was the great ealdorman Aethelred of western or English Mercia, his brother-in-law. When this chief died, Edward found his widowed sister Aethelflaed, in whose hands he left the rule of the Mercian counties, no less zealous and able an assistant than her husband had been. It was with her co-operation that he started on his long series of campaigns against the Danes of central and eastern England. While Edward, starting forward from London, worked his way into Essex and East Anglia, Aethelflaed was at the same time urging on the Mercians against the Danes of the Five Boroughs. They moved forward systematically, erecting successive lines of "burghs," or moated and palisaded strongholds, opposite the centres of Danish resistance, and holding them with permanent garrisons.

The Danes were now much more easy to deal with than in the old days, for they had given hostages to fortune, and were the possessors of towns and villages which could be plundered, farmsteads that could be burned, and cattle that could be lifted. So when they found that they could not storm the "burghs" of Edward and Aethelflaed, or drive off the garrisons which raided on their fields, they began one after the other to submit. The last Danish king of East Anglia was slain in battle at Tempsford, near Bedford, in 921, and his realm was incorporated with Wessex. Then, while Aethelflaed compelled Derby and Leicester to yield, her brother subdued Stamford and Lincoln. So all England south of the Humber was won and cut up into new shires, like those of Wessex. Having accomplished her share in this great work, the Lady Aethelflaed died, and the great ealdormanry which she had ruled was absorbed into her brother's kingdom.

[Sidenote: =Edward over-lord of all England.=]

In their terror at Edward's ceaseless advance and never-ending successes, not only did the Danes of Northumbria do him homage, but even the distant kings of the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh "took him to father and lord" in a great meeting held at Dore in 924.

[Sidenote: =Aethelstan, 925-941.--Subjection of Northumbria.--Battle of Brunanburgh.=]

Having thus become the over-lord of all Britain, Edward died in 925, leaving the throne to his son Aethelstan. This prince was his worthy successor, and carried out still further the process of annexing all England to the Wessex inheritance. His great achievement was the complete subjection and annexation of Northumbria. When Sihtric the Danish King of York died, Aethelstan seized on his kingdom, and drove his sons over sea. The dispossessed princes stirred up enemies against their conqueror, and formed a great league against him. Anlaf, the king of the Danes of Ireland, brought over a great host of Vikings, while Constantine, king of the Scots, and Owen, king of Cumbria, came down from the north to join him. The Danes of Yorkshire at once rose in rebellion to aid the invaders. Against this league Aethelstan marched forth at the head of the English of Mercia and Wessex. He met them at Brunanburgh, a spot of unknown site, somewhere in Lancashire. There Aethelstan smote them with a great slaughter, so that Anlaf returned to Ireland with but a handful of men, and Constantine--who lost his son and heir in the fight--fled away hastily to his own northern deserts. The fight of Brunanburgh, the greatest battle that the house of Alfred had yet won, finally settled the fact that Danish England was to be incorporated with the realm of the Wessex over-kings, and that there was to be one nation, not two, from the borders of Scotland to the British Channel. This great victory drew from an unknown poet the famous "Song of Brunanburgh" which has been inserted in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle." It tells of the glories of Aethelstan, and how--

"Never was yet such slaughter In this island, since hitherward English and Saxons came up from the east, Over the broad seas, and won this our land."

The fight made Aethelstan once more lord of all Britain. The Scot king hastened to renew his submission, the Welsh and Cornish did him homage, the turbulent Northumbrian Danes bowed before him. He was considered so much the most powerful monarch in Western Europe, that all the neighbouring kings sought his alliance, and asked for the hands of ladies of his house. Of his sisters, one was married to the Emperor Otto I., one to Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, others to the King of Arles and the Counts of Paris and Flanders.

[Sidenote: =Edmund. 941-946.--Strathclyde granted as a fief to the Scotch king.=]

Aethelstan died young, and left no son. He was followed on the throne by his two brothers Edmund and Eadred, who were equally unfortunate in being cut off in the flower of their age. Edmund suppressed more than one rebellion of the Northumbrian Danes, and completely conquered the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. Instead of incorporating it with England, he bestowed it as a fief on his vassal, Malcolm, King of the Scots, "on condition that he should be his faithful fellow-worker by sea and land." This was the first extension of Scotland to the south of the Clyde and Forth. Up to this time the Scots and the Picts, with whom they had become blended since the Scot Kenneth McAlpine had been elected king of the Picts in 836, had only ruled in the Highlands. Edmund came to a strange and bloody end. As he feasted in his hall at Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire, he saw to his anger and surprise a notorious outlaw named Leofa enter the hall and seat himself at a table. The servants tried to turn him out, but he held his place, and Edmund grew so wrathful that he sprang from his high seat and rushed down to drag the intruder out with his own hands. He seized Leofa by the hair and threw him down, but the outlaw drew a knife and stabbed him to the heart.

[Sidenote: =Eadred. 946-955.=]

Eadred, the next king, was a prince of weak health, fonder of the church than the battle-field. Nevertheless he carried on his brother's policy, and kept a firm hand over the whole island of Britain. He put down the last rising of the Danes of Yorkshire, who had proclaimed Eric-with-the-bloody-axe as their king, and made one last attempt to assert their independence. After this he cut up Northumbria into two earldoms, and gave them both to an Englishman named Oswulf, to be ruled as separate provinces.

[Sidenote: =Rise of Dunstan.=]

Eadred was the patron and protector of the wise abbot Dunstan, the first of the great clerical statesmen who made a mark on the history of England. He was a man of great ability and learning, who had risen to be abbot of Glastonbury under Edmund, and became one of the chief advisers of the pious Eadred, who was attracted to him as much by his asceticism as by his eminent mental qualities. Dunstan was a man with a purpose. He wished to reform the English Church in the direction of monastic asceticism, and was most especially anxious to make compulsory the celibacy of the clergy, a practice which had not hitherto been enforced in England. There was undoubtedly much ignorance and a certain amount of ill-living among the secular clergy, and Dunstan, not content with warring against this, tried also to reform the monasteries all over the face of the land, and to enforce the rule of St. Benedict, "poverty, chastity, and obedience," in every place. Dunstan's method of carrying out his views was by winning court influence, which he was very fitted to obtain, for he was the cleverest, most versatile, and most learned man of his day.

[Sidenote: =Eadwig, 955-959.--Quarrel with Dunstan.=]

When the pious Eadred died, he was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig (Edwy), the son of his brother Edmund. This prince had been a child when Leofa the outlaw slew his father, and the Witan had put him aside in favour of his uncle, because the rule of a minor was always disliked by the English. But now he was seventeen, and a very rash and headstrong youth.

Eadwig very soon quarrelled with Dunstan and with Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, because he insisted on taking to wife the Lady Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), who was his near kinswoman, and within the "prohibited degrees" of the mediaeval Church. The churchmen declared her to be no true wife of the king, and treated the royal pair with such insult that Eadwig grew furious. The tale is well known how, when Eadwig at a high feast had retired betimes to his wife's chamber, Oda and another bishop followed him and dragged him back by force to the board where the thegns were feasting.

[Sidenote: =Triumph of the Church party.=]

The king, as was natural, quarrelled with the Church party, and drove Dunstan out of England. But his clerical opponents were too much for him: they conspired with the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria, and with many discontented thegns, and set up against Eadwig his younger brother Eadgar, whom Archbishop Oda crowned as King of England. There followed civil war, in which Eadwig had the worst; his wife fell into the hands of Oda, who cruelly branded her with hot irons and shipped her to Ireland. Only Wessex adhered to the cause of Eadwig, and he was at last compelled to bow before his enemies. He acknowledged his brother as King of all England north of Thames, and died almost immediately after (959).

[Sidenote: =Eadgar, 959-975.--Ascendency of Dunstan.=]

His death put the whole realm into the hands of Eadgar, or rather of Eadgar's friends of the Church party, for the new king was still very young. He recalled Dunstan from exile to make him his chief councillor; and when Archbishop Oda died, he gave the see of Canterbury to him. For the seventeen years of Eadgar's rule Dunstan was his prime minister, and much of the character of the earlier years of the king's reign must be attributed to the prelate.

Dunstan's policy had two sides: he used his secular powers to enforce his religious views, and everywhere he and his friends began reforming the monasteries by forcing them to adopt the Benedictine rule. They expelled the secular canons, many of whom were married men, from the cathedrals, and replaced them with monks. They also dealt severely with the custom of lay persons receiving church preferment, one of the commonest abuses of the time.

[Sidenote: =Complete conciliation of the Danes.--Power of Eadgar.=]

But Dunstan was not only an ecclesiastical reformer. His activity had another and a more practical side. To him, in conjunction with Eadgar, is to be attributed the complete unification of the Anglo-Danes and the English. Instead of being treated as subjects of doubtful loyalty, the men of the Danelagh were now made the equals of the men of Wessex, by being promoted to ealdormanries and bishoprics, and admitted as members of the Witan. Eadgar kept so many of them about his person that he even provoked the thegns of Wessex to murmuring. But the policy of trust and conciliation had the best effects, and for the future the Anglo-Danes may be regarded as an integral part of the English nation.

When he came to years of maturity, Eadgar proved to be a capable prince. His power was so universally acknowledged in Britain that his neighbours never dared attack him, and he became known as the rex pacificus in whose time were known no wars. All the kings of the island served him with exact obedience; the story is well known how he made his six chief vassals--the kings of Scotland, Cumbria, Man, and three Welsh chiefs--row him across the Dee, and then exclaimed that those who followed might now in truth call themselves kings of Britain.

[Sidenote: =Legislation.--The Ordinance of the Hundred.=]

Eadgar was a firm ruler, and the author of a very considerable body of laws. To him is attributable the first organization of local police in England, by the issue of the "Ordinance of the Hundred," which divided the shires into smaller districts after the Frankish model, and made the inhabitants of each hundred responsible for the putting down of theft, robbery, and violence in their own district. He allowed the Danish half of England to keep a code of laws of its own, but assimilated it, as much as he was able, to that which prevailed in the rest of the land, making Dane and Englishman as equal in all things as he could contrive.

To the misfortune of his realm, Eadgar died in 975, before he had attained his fortieth year, leaving behind him two young sons, neither of whom had yet reached his majority. When he was gone, it was soon seen how much the prosperity of England had depended on the personal ability of the house of Alfred. Under weak kings there began once more to arise great troubles for the land.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The inscription reads "AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN," or "Alfred had me made."

[6] Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Bucks, Middlesex, Hertfordshire.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. THE DAYS OF CNUT AND EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

For a full century (871-975) England had been under the rule of a series of kings of marked ability. Only the short reign of the unfortunate Eadwig interrupts the succession of strong rulers. We have seen how in that century England fought down all her troubles, and, after appearing for a time to be on the brink of destruction, emerged as a strong and united power. But on the death of Eadgar a new problem had to be faced--the kingdom passed to two young boys, of whom the second proved to be one of the most unworthy and incompetent monarchs that England was ever to know.

[Sidenote: =Edward the Martyr. 975-978.--Insubordination of the great ealdormen.=]

Edward the Younger, or the Martyr, as after-generations called him, only sat for three years on his father's throne. He endeavoured to follow in Eadgar's steps, and retained Dunstan as his chief councillor. But he found the great ealdormen unruly subjects; they would not obey a young boy as they had obeyed the great Eadgar. Dunstan was made the chief mark of their envy, because he represented the policy of a firm central government and a strong monarchical power. Probably they would have succeeded in getting him dismissed at the Witan held at Calne, if a supposed miracle had not intervened to save him. While his adversaries were pleading against him, the floor of the upper chamber where the Witan was sitting gave way, owing to the breaking of a beam, and they were precipitated into the room below, some being killed and others maimed. But the piece of flooring where Dunstan stood did not fall with the rest, so that he remained unharmed amid the general destruction, wherefore men deemed that God had intervened to bear witness to his innocence.

But Dunstan was not to rule much longer. In 978 his young master was cruelly murdered by his step-mother, Queen Aelfthryth, who knew that the crown would fall to her own son if Edward died. For one day the king chanced to ride past her manor of Corfe, and, stopping at the door, craved a cup of wine. She brought it out to him herself, and while he was drinking it to her health, one of her retainers stabbed him in the back. His horse started forward, and he lost his seat and was dragged some way by the stirrup ere he died. The queen's friends threw the body into a ditch, and gave out that he had perished by an accidental fall, but all the realm knew or suspected the truth.

[Sidenote: =Aethelred the Redeless, 978-1016.--Decline of the kingly power.=]

Nevertheless, Aelfthryth's boy Aethelred got the profit of his mother's wicked deed, for the Witan crowned him as the sole heir to King Eadgar. His long reign was worthy of its evil commencement, for it proved one unbroken series of disasters, and brought England at last to the feet of a foreign conqueror. He ruled for thirty-eight years of misery and trouble, for which he was himself largely responsible, for he was a selfish, idle, dilatory, hard-hearted man, and let himself be guided by unworthy flatterers and favourites, who sought nothing but their own private advantage. Wherefore men called him Aethelred the Redeless, that is the ill-counselled, because he would always choose the evil counsel rather than the good. Yet the king was not wholly to blame for the misfortunes of his reign, for the great ealdormen had their share in the guilt. Freed from the strong hand of Dunstan, who was soon driven away from the court, they acted as independent rulers, each in his own ealdormanry, quarrelled with each other, and disobeyed the king's commands. It was their divisions and jealousies and selfishness that made the king's weakness and idleness so fatal, for, when they refused to obey, he neither could nor would coerce them.

[Sidenote: =Viking invasions.--The Danegelt.=]

The curse of the reign of Aethelred the Redeless was the second coming of the Danes and Northmen to England. For many years they had avoided this island, because they knew that only hard blows awaited them there. But they swarmed all over the rest of Europe, won Normandy from the kings of the West Franks, and pushed their raids as far as the distant shores of Andalusia and Italy. But the news that a weak young king, with disobedient nobles to rule under him, sat on Eadgar's seat, soon brought them back to England. First there came mere plundering bands, as in the old days of the eighth century; but Aethelred did not deal with them sharply and strongly. He bade the ealdormen drive them off; but they were too much occupied with their own quarrels to stir. Then the invaders came in greater numbers, and Aethelred thought to bribe them to go away by giving them money, and raised the tax called the Danegelt to satisfy their rapacity. But it seemed that the more that gold was given the more did Danes appear, for the news of Aethelred's wealth and weakness flew round the North, and brought swarm after swarm of marauders upon him. Then followed twenty miserable years of desultory fighting and incessant paying of tribute. Sometimes individual ealdormen fought bravely against the Danes, and held them at bay for a space; sometimes the king himself mustered an army and strove to do something for the realm; sometimes he tried to hire one band of Vikings to fight against another, with the deplorable results that might have been expected. His worst and most unwise action was the celebrated massacre of St. Brice's Day, in 1002, when he caused all the Danes on whom he could lay hands to be killed. In this case it was not open enemies whom he slew, for it was a time of truce, but Danish merchants and adventurers who had settled down in England and done him homage. By this cruel deed Aethelred won the deadly hatred of Swegen, King of Denmark, whose sister and her husband had been among the slain.

[Sidenote: =Ravages of Swegen of Denmark.--Eadric "the Grasper."=]

Swegen became Aethelred's bitterest foe, and repeatedly warred against him, not with mere Viking bands, but with the whole force of Denmark at his back, a great national army bent on serious invasion of the land, not on transient raiding. The English were driven to despair by Swegen's ravages, and the king did nothing to save them. He had now fallen entirely into the hands of an unscrupulous favourite, named Eadric Streona, or the Grasper, and was guided in all things by this low-born adventurer. He even created him Ealdorman of Mercia, and made him the second person in the land. Eadric cared only for ruining any noble who could possibly be his rival, and for enlarging his ealdormanry; of the defence of England he took no more thought than did his master.

[Sidenote: =Swegen chosen king by the Witan.=]

At last, in 1013, there came a Danish invasion of exceptional severity. The marauders dashed through the country from end to end; they took Canterbury and slew the good Archbishop Elfheah (St. Alphege), because he refused to pay them an exorbitant ransom. Then Eadric gathered together the Witan, without the king's presence, and, with infamous treachery to his benefactor, proposed to them to submit entirely to the Danes. So when Swegen came over again in the next year, the whole realm bowed before him, and the great men, headed by the traitor Eadric, offered him the crown. Only London held out for King Aethelred, and stood a long siege, till its citizens learnt that their master had deserted them and fled over sea to the Duke of Normandy, whose sister Emma he had married. Then they too yielded, and the Witan of all England took Swegen as their king. But the Dane died immediately after his election, and then the majority of the English refused to choose his son Cnut as his successor. They sent to Normandy for their old king, and did homage once more to Aethelred; but the traitor Eadric resolved to adhere to Cnut, because he had lately murdered the thegns of the Five Boroughs, and dreaded the wrath of their followers. So Eadric's Mercian subjects and some of the men of Wessex joined the Danes, and there was civil war once more in England, till Aethelred the Ill-counselled died in 1016.

[Sidenote: =Edmund Ironside and Cnut, 1016.=]

Then his followers chose in his stead his brave son Edmund II., who was called Ironside because of his prowess in war. The new king was a worthy descendant of Alfred, and would have made no small mark in better times, but he spent his short reign in one unceasing series of combats with Cnut, a man as able and as warlike as himself. The two young kings fought five pitched battles with each other, and fortune swayed to Edmund's side; but in the sixth, at Assandun (Ashington, in Essex), he was defeated, owing to the treachery of the wretched Eadric the Grasper, who first joined him with a large body of Mercian troops, and then turned against him in the heat of the battle (1016).

Then Edmund and Cnut, having learnt to respect each other's courage, met in the Isle of Alney, outside the walls of Gloucester, and agreed to divide the realm between them. Cnut took, as was natural, the Anglo-Danish districts of Northumbria and the Five Boroughs, together with Eadric's Mercian ealdormanry. Edmund kept Wessex, Kent, London, and East Anglia. But this partition was not destined to endure. Ere the year was out the foul traitor Eadric procured the murder of King Edmund, and then the Witan of Wessex chose Cnut as king over the south as well as the north. The late king's young brothers and his two little sons fled to the Continent.

[Sidenote: =The empire of Cnut.=]

So Cnut the Dane became King of all England, and ruled it wisely and well for nineteen years (1016-35). He proved a much better king than people expected, for, being a very young man and easily impressed, he grew to be more of an Englishman than a Dane in all his manners and habits of thought. He ruled in Denmark and Norway as well as in this island, but he made England his favourite abode, and regarded it as the centre and heart of his empire. The moment that he was firmly established on the throne, he took measures for restoring the prosperity of the land, which had been reduced to an evil plight by forty years of ill-governance and war. He swept away the great ealdormen who had been such a curse to the land, slaying the traitor Eadric the Grasper, and Uhtred the turbulent governor of Northumbria. Then he divided England into four great earldoms, as these provinces began to be called, for the Danish name jarl (earl) was beginning to supersede the Saxon name ealdorman. Of these he entrusted the two Anglo-Danish earldoms, Northumbria and East Anglia, to men of Danish blood, while he gave Wessex and Mercia to two Englishmen who had served him faithfully, the earls Godwine and Leofric. The confidence in the loyalty of his English subjects which Cnut displayed was very marked: he sent home to Denmark the whole of his army, save a body-guard of two thousand or three thousand house-carles, or personal retainers, and did not divide up the lands of England among them. He kept many Englishmen about his person, and even sent them as bishops or royal officers to Denmark, a token of favour of which the Danes did not altogether approve. He endeavoured to connect himself with the old English royal house, by marrying Emma of Normandy, the widow of King Aethelred, though she was somewhat older than himself, so Cnut's younger children were the half-brothers of Aethelred's.

[Sidenote: =He gives Lothian to the King of Scotland.=]

Cnut gave England the peace which she had not known since the death of Eadgar, for no one dared to stir up war against a king who was not only Lord of Britain, but ruled all the lands of the Northmen, as far as Iceland and the Faroes and the outlying Danish towns in Ireland. The Welsh and Scots served Cnut as they had served Aethelstan and Eadgar, and were his obedient vassels. In reward of the services of Malcolm of Scotland Cnut gave him the district of Lothian, the northern half of Bernicia, to hold as his vassal. This was the first piece of English-speaking land that any Scottish king ruled, and it was from thence that the English tongue and manners afterwards spread over the whole of the Lowlands beyond the Tweed.

The rapid recovery of prosperity which followed on Cnut's strong and able government is the best testimony to his wisdom. The wording of the code of laws which he promulgated is a witness to his good heart and excellent purposes. His subjects loved him well, and many tales survive to show their belief in his sagacity, such as the well-known story of his rebuke to the flattering courtiers who ascribed to him omnipotence by the incoming waves of Southampton Water.

[Sidenote: =The sons of Cnut, 1035-1042.=]

Cnut died in 1035, before he had much passed the boundary of middle age. He left two sons, Harold and Harthacnut, the former the child of a concubine, the latter the offspring of Queen Emma. With his death his empire broke up, for Norway revolted, and the Danes of Denmark chose Harthacnut as their king, while those of England preferred the bastard Harold. Only Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex, declared for Harthacnut, and made England south of the Thames swear allegiance to him. So Harold reigned for a space in Northumbria and Mercia, while Denmark and Wessex obeyed his younger brother. The two sons of Cnut were rough, godless, unscrupulous young men, and hated each other bitterly, for each thought that the other had robbed him of part of his rightful heritage. Moreover, Harold enraged Harthacnut by catching and slaying his elder half-brother Alfred, the son of Aethelred and Emma, whom he enticed over to England by fair words, and then murdered by blinding him with hot irons.

After a space Harold overran Wessex, which Earl Godwine surrendered to him because Harthacnut sent no aid from Denmark, where he tarried over-long. But just after he had been saluted as ruler of all England, Harold died, and his realm fell to his absent brother. Harthacnut then came over with a large army, and took possession of the land. He ruled ill for the short space of his life; it was with horror that men saw him exhume his half-brother's corpse and cast it into a ditch. He raised great taxes to support his Danish army, and dealt harshly with those who did not pay him promptly. But just as all England was growing panic-stricken at his tyranny, he died suddenly. He was celebrating the marriage of one of his followers, Osgood Clapa, at the thegn's manor of Clapham, in Surrey, when, as he raised the wine-cup to drink the bridegroom's health, he fell back in an apoplectic fit, and never spoke again (1042).

[Sidenote: =Edward the Confessor, 1042-1066.=]

The English Witan had now before them the task of choosing a new king. Cnut's house was extinct, and with it died all chance of the perpetuation of a northern empire in which England and Denmark should be united. It was natural that the council should cast their eyes back on the old royal house of Alfred, for its eldest member was at this time in England. Harthacnut had called over from Normandy Edward, his mother's second son by King Aethelred, the younger brother of that Etheling Alfred whom Harold had murdered five years before.

It was with little hesitation, therefore, that the Witan, led by Earl Godwine, the greatest of the rulers of the realm, elected Edward to fill the vacant throne. The prince's virtues were already known and esteemed, and his failings had yet to be learnt. Edward was now a man of middle age, mild, pious, and well-meaning, but wanting in strength and vigour, and needing some strong arm on which to lean. He had spent his whole youth in Normandy, at the court of Duke Richard, his mother's brother, and had almost forgotten England and the English tongue during his long exile. Just as Cnut had become an Englishman, so Edward had become for all intents and purposes a Norman.

[Sidenote: =Godwine, Earl of Wessex.--The king's Norman favourites.=]

During the first few years of his reign in England, the new king was entirely in the hands of Godwine, the great Earl of Wessex. He married the thegn's daughter Eadgyth (Edith), and entrusted him with the greater part of the administration of the realm. But Edward and Godwine were not likely to remain friends; there were several causes of dispute between them. The most important was the fact that the king secretly believed that Godwine had been a consenting party to the murder of his brother Alfred by King Harold. But the most obvious was Godwine's dislike for the Norman favourites of the king. For Edward sent for all the friends of his youth from Normandy, and gave them high preferment in England, making Robert of Jumièges Archbishop of Canterbury, and bestowing bishoprics on other Norman priests, and an earldom on Ralf of Mantes, his own nephew. He also showed high favour to two more of his continental kinsmen, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and William the Bastard, the reigning duke of Normandy. William declared that Edward had even promised to leave the crown of England to him at his death; and it is possible that the king may have expressed some such wish, but he had not the power to carry it out, for the election of the English kings lay with the Witan, and not with the reigning sovereign.

[Sidenote: =Exile and return of Godwine.=]

The troubles of Edward's reign began in 1050, starting from a chance affray at Dover. Eustace of Boulogne was landing to pay a visit to the king, when some of his followers fell into a quarrel with some of the citizens. Men were slain on both sides, and the count was chased out of the town with hue and cry. The king took this ill, and bade Godwine--in whose earldom Dover lay--to punish the men who had insulted his noble kinsman. But Godwine refused, saying--what was true enough--that the count's followers were to blame, and the burghers in the right. Edward was angry at the earl's disobedience, and called to him in arms those of the English nobles who were jealous of Godwine, especially Leofric, the Earl of Mercia, and Siward, the Earl of Northumbria. Godwine also gathered a host of the men of Wessex, and it seemed that civil war would begin. But the earl was unwilling to fight the king, and when the Witan outlawed him, he fled over seas to Flanders with his sons, Harold, Swegen, and Tostig. Edward then fell entirely into the hands of his Norman favourites. He sent his wife, Godwine's daughter, to a nunnery, and disgraced all who had any kinship with the exiled earl. But the governance of the Norman courtiers was hateful to the English, and when Godwine and his sons came back a year later, and sailed up the Thames with a great fleet, the whole land was well pleased. No one would fight against him, and the Norman bishops and knights about the king's person had to fly in haste to save their lives. Then the Witan inlawed Godwine again, and Edward was obliged to give him back his ancient place (1052). So the great earl once more ruled England, holding Wessex himself, while his second son Harold ruled as earl in East Anglia, and his third son Tostig became the king's favourite companion, though he was a reckless, cruel man, very unlike the mild and pious Edward.

[Sidenote: =Death of Godwine.--His son Harold takes his place.=]

The house of Godwine kept a firm control over the realm during the last fourteen years of Edward's reign. When Godwine died suddenly at a great feast at Winchester,[7] his son Harold succeeded both to his earldom of Wessex and to his preponderant power in England. The years of Harold's governance were on the whole a time of prosperity, for he was a busy, capable man, much liked by all the English of the south, though the Mercians and Northumbrians did not love him so well.

Harold knew how to make the authority of the King of England over his smaller neighbours respected. It was during his tenure of power that Siward, earl of Northumbria, was sent into Scotland to put down Macbeth, the lord of Moray, who had murdered King Duncan and seized his crown. Siward slew Macbeth in battle at Lumphanan, and restored to the throne of Scotland Malcolm, the eldest son of the late king (1054). A little later Harold himself took the field to put down Gruffyd, the King of North Wales, who had risen in rebellion. He drove the Welsh up into the crags of Snowdon, and besieged them there till they slew their own king and laid his head at the earl's feet.

[Sidenote: =Harold's detention in Normandy.=]

It was somewhere about this time that a misfortune fell upon Harold. He was sailing in the Channel, when a storm arose and drove his ship ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, near the Somme-mouth. Wido, the Count of Ponthieu, an unscrupulous and avaricious man, threw the earl into prison, and held him to ransom. But William, Duke of Normandy, who was Wido's feudal superior, delivered him from bonds, and brought him to his court at Rouen. Harold abode with the duke for some time, half as guest, half as hostage, for William would not let him depart. He went on an expedition against Brittany with the Normans, and received knighthood at the duke's hands. After a time he was told that he might return home if he would engage to use all his endeavours to get William elected King of England at the death of Edward. The duke said that he had gained such a promise from Edward himself, and thought he could make sure of the prize with Harold's aid. Thus tempted, the earl consented to swear this unwise and unjust oath, and in presence of the whole Norman court vowed to aid William's candidature. When he had sworn, the duke showed him that the shrine at which he had pledged his faith was full of the bones of all the saints of Normandy, which had been secretly collected to make the oath more solemn.

[Sidenote: =Dissensions in England.--Eadwine and Morcar.=]

So Harold returned to England, and--as it would appear--soon forgot his oath altogether, or thought of it only as extorted by force and fear. He had anxieties enough to distract his mind to other subjects. First Mercia gave trouble, because Aelfgar, the son of Earl Leofric, was jealous of Harold's predominance in the realm. He twice took arms and was twice outlawed for treason. Nevertheless, Harold confirmed his son Eadwine in the possession of the Mercian earldom. Next, Northumbria broke out into armed rebellion. The king had made his favourite Tostig, Harold's younger brother, earl of the great northern province when the aged Siward, the conqueror of Macbeth, died. But Tostig ruled so harshly and so unjustly, that the Anglo-Danes of Yorkshire rose in rebellion, put Morcar, the son of Aelfgar of Mercia, at their head, and drove Tostig away. When Harold investigated the matter, he found that Tostig was so much in the wrong that he advised the king to banish his brother, and to confirm Morcar in the Northumbrian earldom. This resolve, though just and upright, weakened Harold's hold on the land, for Mercia and Northumbria were thus put in the hands of the two brothers, Eadwine and Morcar, who worked together in all things and were very jealous of the great Earl of Wessex, in spite of his kindly dealings with them (1065).

[Sidenote: =Death of King Edward.=]

Less than a year after Tostig's deposition King Edward died. The English mourned him greatly, for, in spite of his weakness and his tendency to favour the Normans over-much, he was an upright, kindly, well-intentioned man, whom none could hate or despise. Moreover, his sincere piety made the English revere him as a saint; it was said that he had divine revelations vouchsafed to him, and that St. Peter had once appeared to him in a vision and given him a ring. It is, at any rate, certain that he built the Abbey of Westminster in St. Peter's honour, and lavished on it a very rich endowment. The English looked back to Edward's reign as a kind of golden age in the evil times that followed, and worshipped him as a saint; but the good governance of the realm owed far more to Godwine and Harold than to the gentle, unworldly king.

[Sidenote: =Harold elected king by the Witan.=]

On Edward's death the Witan had to choose them a king. The next heir of the house of Alfred was a child, Eadgar the Etheling, the great-nephew of the deceased monarch. He was only ten years of age, and there was no precedent for electing so young a boy to rule England. Outside the royal line there were two persons who were known to desire the crown: the first was the man who had for all practical purposes governed England for the last fourteen years, Earl Harold of Wessex, the late king's brother-in-law; the other was William the Norman. It was said that Edward had once promised to use his influence in his Norman cousin's favour, but it is certain that on his death-bed he recommended Harold to the assembled thegns and bishops. The Witan did not waver for a minute in their decision; they chose Harold, and he accepted the crown without any show of hesitation. Yet it was certain that his elevation would bring on him the bitter jealousy of the young Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, who regarded themselves as his equals, in every respect. And it was equally clear that William of Normandy, who had counted on Harold's assistance in his candidature for the throne, would vent his wrath and disappointment on the new king's head (Jan., 1066).

[Sidenote: =Claim of William of Normandy to the crown.=]

Harold attempted to conciliate the sons of Aelfgar by paying them every attention in his power, and by marrying their sister Ealdgyth. But to appease the stern Duke of Normandy he knew was impossible, and he looked for nothing but war from that quarter. Indeed, he was hardly mounted on the throne before William sent over ambassadors to formally bid him fulfil his oath and resign the crown, or take the consequences. It need hardly be added that Harold replied that the Witan's choice was his mandate, and that his oath had been extorted by force.

[Sidenote: =He prepares to invade England.=]

The Duke of Normandy was firmly resolved to assert his baseless claim to the throne by force of arms. He had a large treasure and many bold vassals, but he knew that his own strength was insufficient for such an enterprise as the invasion of England. Accordingly, he proclaimed his purpose all over Western Europe, and offered lands and spoil in England to every adventurer who would take arms in his cause. William's military reputation was so great, that he was able to enlist thousands of mercenaries from France, Brittany, Flanders, and Aquitaine. Of the great army that he mustered at the port of St. Valery, only one-third were native Normans. William took six months for his preparation; he had to build a fleet, since Harold had a navy able to keep the Channel, and to beat up every freelance that could be hired to take service with him. Nor did he neglect to add spiritual weapons to temporal: he won over the Pope to give his blessing on the invasion of England, because Harold had broken the oath he swore on the bones of all the saints, and had become a perjurer. There were other reasons for Pope Alexander's dislike for the English. Stigand, Harold's Archbishop of Canterbury, had acknowledged an anti-Pope, and Rome never forgave schism; moreover, the house of Godwine had not been friendly to the monks, but had been patrons of Dunstan's old foes, the secular canons. Alexander therefore sent William his blessing, and a consecrated banner to be unfurled when he should land in England.

Hearing of William's vast preparations, Harold arrayed a fleet to guard the narrow seas, and bade the fyrd of all England to be ready to muster on the Sussex coast. He was prepared to defend himself, and only wondered at the delay in his adversary's sailing, a delay which was caused by north-westerly winds, which kept the Normans storm-bound.

[Sidenote: =Harald Hardrada invades Northumbria.=]

Suddenly there came to Harold disastrous and unexpected news from the north. His exiled brother Tostig had chosen this moment to do him an ill turn. He had gone to the north, and persuaded Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, to invade England. Hardrada was the greatest Viking that ever existed, the most celebrated adventurer by sea and land of his age. When Tostig offered him the plunder of England, he took ship with all his host and descended on Northumbria. Morcar, the young earl of that region, came out to meet him, with his brother Eadwine at his side. But Hardrada defeated them with fearful slaughter before the gates of York, and took the city.

[Sidenote: =Harold marches northward.--Battle of Stamford Bridge.=]

When Harold of England heard this news he was constrained to leave the south, and risk the chance of William's landing unopposed. He took with him his house-carles, the great band of his personal retainers, and marched in haste on York, picking up the levies of the midland shires on the way.

So rapidly did Harold move, that he caught the Northmen quite unprepared, and came upon them at Stamford Bridge, close to York, when they least expected him. There he defeated the invaders in a great battle. Its details are unfortunately lost, for the noble Norwegian saga that gives the story of Hardrada's fall was written too long after to be trusted as good history. It tells how the English king rode forward to the invading army, and, calling to his brother, offered him pardon and a great earldom. But Tostig asked what his friend Harald of Norway should receive. "Seven feet of English earth, seeing that he is taller than other men," answered Harold of England. Then Tostig cried aloud that he would never desert those who had helped him in his day of need, and the fight began. We know that both the rebel earl and the Norse king fell, that the raven banner of the Vikings was taken, and that the remnant only of their host escaped. It is said that they came in three hundred ships, and fled in twenty-four.

[Sidenote: =Landing of the Normans.=]

Harold of England was celebrating his victory at York by a great feast a few nights after the battle of Stamford Bridge, when a message was brought him that William of Normandy had crossed the Channel and landed in Sussex with a hundred thousand men at his back. Harold hurried southward with his house-carles, bidding the Earls Eadwine and Morcar bring on the levies of Mercia and Northumbria to his aid as fast as they might. But the envious sons of Aelfgar betrayed their brother-in-law, and followed so slowly that they never overtook him. Harold marched rapidly on London, and gathered up the fyrd of East Anglia, Kent, and Wessex, so that he reached the coast with a considerable army, though it was one far inferior in numbers to William's vast host. Not a man from Mercia or Northumbria was with him; but the levies of the southern shires, where the house of Godwine was so well loved, were present in full force.

[Sidenote: =The battle of Hastings.=]

William had now been on shore some ten or twelve days, and had built himself a great intrenched camp at Hastings. But the King of England, as befitted the commander of the smaller host, came to act on the defensive, not on the offensive. He took post on the hill of Senlac, where Battle Abbey now stands, and arrayed his army in a good position, strengthened with palisades. He was resolved to accept battle, though his brother Gyrth and many others of his council bade him wait till Eadwine and Morcar should come up with the men of the north, and meanwhile, to sweep the land clear of provisions and starve out William's army. The Norman duke desired nothing more than a pitched battle; he knew that he was superior in numbers, and believed that he could out-general his adversary. When he heard that Harold had halted at Senlac, he broke up his camp at Hastings, and marched inland. The English were found all on foot, for they had not yet learnt to fight on horseback, drawn up in one thick line on the hillside, around the dragon-banner of Wessex and the standard of the Fighting Man, which was Harold's private ensign. The king's house-carles, sheathed in complete mail, and armed with the two-handed Danish axe, were formed round the banners; on each flank were the levies of the shires, an irregular mass where well-armed thegns and yeomen were mixed with their poorer neighbours, who bore rude clubs and instruments of husbandry as their sole weapons.

William's army was marshalled in a different way. The flower of the duke's host was his cavalry, and the Norman knights were the best horse-soldiery in Europe. His army was drawn up in three great bodies, the two wings composed of his French, Flemish, and Breton mercenaries, the centre of the native Normans. In each body the mounted men were preceded by a double line of archers and troops on foot.

The two hosts joined in close combat, and for some hours the fighting was indecisive. Neither the arrows of the Norman bowmen, nor the charges of their knights, could break the English line of battle. The invaders were driven back again and again, and the axes of the men of Harold made cruel gaps in their ranks, cleaving man and horse with their fearful blows. At last William bade his knights draw off for a space, and bade the archers only continue the combat. He trusted that the English, who had no bowmen on their side, would find the rain of arrows so insupportable that they would at last break their line and charge, to drive off their tormentors. Nor was he wrong; after standing unmoved for some time, the English could no longer contain themselves, and, in spite of their king's orders and entreaties, the shire-levies on the wings rushed down the hill in wild rage and fell upon the Normans. When they were scattered by their fiery charge, the duke let loose his horsemen upon them, and the disorderly masses were ridden down and slain or driven from the field. The house-carles of Harold still stood firm around the two standards, from which they had not moved, but the rest of the English army was annihilated. Then William led his host against this remnant, a few thousand warriors only, but the pick of Harold's army. Formed in an impenetrable ring, the king's guards held out till nightfall, in spite of constant showers of arrows, alternating with desperate cavalry charges. But Harold himself was mortally wounded by an arrow in the eye, and one by one all his retainers fell around him, till, as the sun was setting, the Normans burst through the broken shield-wall, hewed down the English standards, and pierced the dying king with many thrusts. With Harold there fell his two brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, his uncle Aelfwig, most of the thegnhood of Wessex, and the whole of his heroic band of house-carles.

THE ENGLISH KINGS OF THE HOUSE OF ECGBERT.

ECGBERT, 800-836. | AETHELWULF, 836-858. | +---------------+-------+-------+---------------+ | | | | AETHELBALD, AETHELBERT, AETHELRED I., ALFRED, 855-860. 860-866. 866-871. 871-901. | +---------------------------+-------+ | | EDWARD THE ELDER, Aethelflaed, = Aethelred. 901-925. Lady of Mercia. | +----------------+----------------+ | | | AETHELSTAN, EDMUND I., EADRED, 925-940. 940-946. 946-955. | +--------+--------+ | | EADWIG, EADGAR, 955-959. 959-975. | +-------------+-------------+ | | EDWARD THE MARTYR, AETHELRED II., 975-979. 979-1016. | +------------------+-----------+---------+ | | | EDMUND II., Alfred the Etheling, EDWARD III., 1016. slain 1036. the Confessor, | 1042-1066. Edward the Etheling. | +-------+-------+ | | Eadgar the Margaret = Malcolm, King Etheling. of Scots.

FOOTNOTE:

[7] The Norman historians of a later generation made a very impressive scene of Godwine's death. The king and the earl were dining together, it was said, when Edward spoke out his suspicion that Godwine had been concerned in his brother Alfred's murder. "May the crust that I am eating choke me," cried the earl, "if I had any hand in his death." Forthwith he swallowed it, was seized with a fit, and died on the spot.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. THE NORMAN CONQUEST

William pitched his tents among the dead and dying where the English standards had stood. Next day he could judge of the greatness of his success, and see that the English army had been well-nigh annihilated. He vowed to build a great church on the spot, in memory of his victory, and kept his resolve, as Battle Abbey shows to this day. At first he wished to cast out his fallen rival's body on the sea-shore, as that of a perjurer and an enemy of the Church; but better counsels prevailed, and he finally permitted the canons of Waltham to bury Harold's corpse in holy ground. It is said that no one was able to identify the king among the heaps of stripped and mutilated slain except Edith with the Swan's Neck, a lady whom he had loved and left in earlier days.

[Sidenote: =William elected and crowned in London.=]

William expected to encounter further resistance, and marched slowly and cautiously on London by a somewhat circuitous route, crossing the Thames as high up as Wallingford. But he met with no enemy. Dover, Canterbury, Winchester, and the other cities of the south yielded themselves up to him. In fact, Wessex had been so hard hit by the slaughter at Hastings, that scarce a thegn of note survived to organize resistance. Every grown-up man of Godwine's house had fallen, and of the whole race there remained but two young children of Harold's. Meanwhile the Witan met at London to elect a new king. The two sons of Aelfgar, whose treacherous sloth had ruined England, had hoped that one of them might be chosen to receive the crown; but their conduct had been observed and noted, and rather than take Eadwine or Morcar as lord, the Witan chose the last heir of the house of Aelfred, the boy Eadgar, great-nephew to St. Edward. This choice was hopelessly bad when a victorious enemy was thundering at the gates. Eadwine and Morcar disbanded their levies, and went home in wrath to their earldoms. The south could raise no second army to replace that which had fallen at Hastings, and when William pressed on toward London the followers of Eadgar gave up the contest. As he lay at Berkhamstead, the chief men of London and Ealdred, the Archbishop of York, came out to him, and offered to take him as lord and master. So he entered the city, and there was crowned on Christmas Day 1066, after he had been duly elected in the old English fashion. A strange accident attended the coronation: when the Archbishop Ealdred proposed William's name to the assembly, and the loud shout of assent was given, the Norman soldiery without thought that a riot was beginning, and cut down some of the spectators and fired some houses before they discovered their mistake. So William's reign began, as it was to continue, in blood and fire.

[Sidenote: =Confiscations in south-east England.=]

Eadwine and Morcar and the rest of the English nobles soon did homage to William; but the realm was only half subdued, for, save in the south-east, where the whole manhood of the land had been cut off at Hastings, the English had submitted more for want of leaders and union than because they regarded themselves as conquered. It remained to be seen how the new king would deal with his realm, whether he would make himself well loved by his subjects, as Cnut had done, or whether he would become a tyrant and oppressor. William, though stern and cruel, was a man politic and just according to his lights. He wished to govern England in law and order, and not to maltreat the natives. But he was in an unfortunate position. He knew nothing of the customs and manners of the English, and could not understand a word of their language. Moreover, he could not, like Cnut, send away his foreign army, and rely on the loyalty of the people of the land. For his army was a rabble of mercenaries drawn from many realms outside his own duchy, and he had promised them land and sustenance in England when they enlisted beneath his banner. Accordingly, he had to begin by declaring the estates of all who had fought at Hastings, from Harold the king down to the smallest freeholder, as forfeited to the crown. This put five-sixths of the countryside in Wessex, Essex, Kent, and East Anglia into the king's hands. These vast tracts of land were distributed among the Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton soldiery, in greater and smaller shares, to be held by feudal tenure of knight-service from the king's hands.

[Sidenote: =Other freeholders become tenants of the crown.=]

In the rest of England, those of the native landowners who had not fought at Hastings were allowed to "buy back their lands." That is, they paid William a fine, made him a formal surrender of their estates, and then received them back from him under the new feudal obligations, becoming tenants-in-chief of the crown; agreeing to hold their manors directly from the king as his personal dependents and vassals. So there was no longer any land in England held by the old German freehold tenure, where every man was the sole proprietor of his own soil.

[Sidenote: =Risings in the west and north.=]

If things had stopped here, northern England would have remained in the hands of the old landholders, while southern England passed away to Norman lords. But the rapacious followers of the Conqueror were soon to get foot in the north also. William went back to Normandy in 1067, leaving his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, regent in his stead. The moment that he was gone, the new settlers began to treat the English with a contempt and cruelty which they had not dared to show in their master's presence, and Odo rather encouraged than rebuked them. There followed the natural result, a widespread rising in those parts of England which had not yet felt the Norman sword. Unfortunately for themselves, the English rose with no general plan, and with no unity of purpose, every district fighting for its own hand. The western counties sent for the two sons of Harold, who came to Exeter, and were there saluted as hereditary chiefs of Wessex. But in Northumbria the insurgents proclaimed the Etheling Eadgar as king; and in Mercia there arose a thegn, Eadric the Wild, who was descended from the wicked Eadric Streona, and wished to reassert hereditary claims to his ancestor's earldom.

[Sidenote: =The rebels subdued.--Further confiscations.=]

William immediately returned to England, and attacked the rebels. They gave each other no aid; each district was subdued without receiving any succour from its neighbour. William first marched against Exeter, took it after a long siege, and drove the young sons of Harold over sea to Ireland. Then he moved into Mercia, and chased Eadric the Wild into Wales, clearing Gloucestershire and Worcestershire of insurgents. The North made a perfunctory submission, and a Norman earl, Robert de Comines, was set over it. These abortive insurrections led to much confiscation of landed property in the west and north, which was at once portioned out among William's military retainers (1068).

[Sidenote: =Second rising in Northumbria.--Yorkshire desolated.=]

But there was hard fighting to follow. In the spring of 1069 a second and more serious rising broke out in Northumbria. The insurgents took Durham, slew Earl Robert, and sent to ask the aid of the Kings of Scotland and Denmark. They were headed by Waltheof, Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, the son of that Siward who had vanquished Macbeth. Both the monarchs who had been asked for aid consented to join the rebels. Malcolm Canmore of Scotland had married Margaret, the sister of the Etheling Eadgar, and thought himself bound to aid his brother-in-law. Swegen of Denmark, on the other hand, had hopes of the English crown, to which, as Cnut's successor, he thought he might lay some claim. Waltheof and his army ere long took York, and killed or captured the whole Norman garrison. But after this success the allies drifted apart; Swegen did not care to make Eadgar King of England, and Eadgar's party were angry with the Danes for ravaging and plundering on their own account. When William came up against York with a great host, the Danes took to their ships and left the English unaided. William was too strong for the Northumbrians; he routed them, retook York, and then set to work to punish the country for its twice repeated rebellion. He harried the whole of the fertile Yorkshire plain, from the Humber to the Tees, with fire and sword. The entire population was slain, starved, or driven away. Many fled to Scotland and settled there; others took to the woods and lived like savages. Several years passed before any one ventured forth again to till the wasted lands, and when the great Domesday Book was compiled--nearly twenty years after--it recorded that Yorkshire was still an almost unpeopled wilderness. While William was venting his wrath on the unfortunate Northumbrians, the Danish king, instead of aiding the insurgents, sailed up the Nen to Peterborough, and sacked its great abbey, the pride of the Fenland; this act completely ruined the already failing cause of the English, who would not trust the Danes any longer.

[Sidenote: =Final subjugation of the west--Hereward the Wake.=]

Meanwhile William marched at mid-winter through the snow-covered heights of the Peakland, from York to Chester, to crush out the last smouldering fires of the insurrection on the North-Welsh border. Cheshire and Shropshire bowed before him, and there was then nothing left of the English hosts, save a few scattered bands of fugitives. Waltheof, the leader of the rebellion, submitted to the king, and, to the surprise of all men, was pardoned and restored to his earldom. The Danes returned to Denmark, bribed by William to depart (1070). But the last remnants of the English gathered themselves together in the Fenland under Hereward the Wake, a Lincolnshire man, the most active and undaunted warrior of his day, Hereward fortified himself in an entrenched camp on the Isle of Ely, in the heart of the Fens, and defied the king to reduce him. For more than a year he held his own, and beat off every attack, though William brought up thousands of men and built vast causeways across the marshes in order to approach Hereward's camp of refuge.

[Sidenote: =End of Eadwine and Morcar.--Hereward pardoned.=]

It was at this moment, when the Isle of Ely was the only spot in England that was not in William's hands, that the foolish and selfish earls Eadwine and Morcar thought proper to rebel and take arms against the Normans. They had long lost all influence, even among their own followers, and were crushed with ease. Eadwine fell in a skirmish; Morcar escaped almost alone to Hereward's camp. Soon afterwards that stronghold fell, betrayed to William by the monks of Ely (1071). Hereward escaped, but most of his followers were captured. The king blinded or mutilated many of them, and put Morcar in close prison for the rest of his life. But he offered pardon to Hereward, as he had to Waltheof, for he loved an open foe. The "Last of the English" accepted his terms, was given some estates in Warwickshire, and is found serving with William's army in France a year later.

The English never rose again; their spirit was crushed; ruined by their own disunion and by the selfishness of their leaders, they felt unable to cope any longer with the stern King William. Any trouble that he met in his later years was not due to native rebellions, but to the turbulence and disloyalty of his own Norman followers. Those of the English who could not bear the yoke patiently, fled to foreign lands, many to the court of Scotland, where Queen Margaret, the sister of the Etheling Eadgar, made them welcome; some even as far as Constantinople, to enlist in the "Varangian guard" of the Eastern emperor.

[Sidenote: =The monarchy feudalized.--Villeinage.=]

In the fifteen years that followed, William recast the whole fabric of the English society and constitution, changing the realm into a feudal monarchy of the continental type. Even before the Conquest the tendency of the day had been towards feudalism, as is shown by the excessive predominance of the great earls in the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled and Edward the Confessor, and by the decreasing importance of the smaller freeholders. As early as Eadgar's time a law bade all men below the rank of thegn to "find themselves a lord, who should be responsible for them;" that is, to commend themselves to one of their greater neighbours by a tie of personal homage. But the old-English tie of vassalage, though it placed the small freeholders in personal dependence on the thegns, left them their land as their own, and allowed a man to transfer his allegiance from one lord to another. When, however, the English thegnhood had fallen on Senlac Hill, or had lost their manors for joining in the rebellion of 1069, the condition of their former dependents was much changed for the worse. The Norman knights, who replaced the thegns, knew only the continental form of feudal tenure, where the land, as well as the personal obedience of the vassal, was deemed to belong to the lord. So the English ceorls, who had been the owners of their own land, though they did homage to some thegn for their persons, were reduced to the lower condition of villeinage--that is, they were regarded as tilling the lord's land as tenants, and receiving it from him, in return for a rent in service or in money due to him. And instead of the land being considered to belong to the farmer, the farmer was now considered to belong to the land; that is, he was bound to remain on it and till it, unless his lord gave him permission to depart, being glebae ascriptus, bound to the soil, though he could not, on the other hand, be dispossessed of his farm, or sold away like a slave. The condition of the villein was at its very worst in William's reign, because the burden was newly imposed, and because the Norman masters, who had just taken possession of the English manors, were foreigners who did not comprehend a word of their tenants' speech, or understand their customs and habits. They felt nothing but contempt for the conquered race, whom they regarded as mere barbarians; and hard as was the letter of the feudal law, they made it worse by adding insult to mere oppression. They crushed their vassals by incessant tallages, or demands for money over and above the rent in money or service that was due, and allowed their Norman stewards and underlings to maltreat the peasantry as much as they chose. It should be remembered also that, evil though the plight of the villein might be, there were others even more unhappy than he, since there were many among the peasantry who were actually slaves, and could be bought and sold like cattle. These were the class who represented the original theows or slaves of the old English social system.

[Sidenote: =Predominance of the crown.=]

Feudalism, then, so far as it meant the complete subjection of the peasant, both in body and in land, to the lord of his manor, was perfected in England by the Norman conquest. But there was another aspect of the feudal system, as it existed on the continent, which England was fortunate enough to escape. The crowning misery of the other lands of Western Europe was that the king's power in them had grown so weak, that he could not protect his subjects against the earls and barons who were their immediate lords. In France, for example, the king could not exercise the simplest royal rights in the land of his greater vassals, such as the Duke of Normandy or the Count of Anjou. All regal functions, from the coining of money to the holding of courts of justice, had passed to the great vassals. Even when a count or duke rebelled and declared war against the king, his liegemen were considered bound to follow their master and take part in his treason. Now William was determined that this abuse should never take root in England. He was careful not to allow any of his subjects to grow too strong; in distributing the lands of England he invariably scattered the possessions of each of his followers, so that no one man had any great district entirely in his hands. He gave his favourites land in eight or ten different counties, but in each they only possessed a fraction of the whole. There were only three exceptions to this rule. He created "palatine earls" in Cheshire, Shropshire, and Durham, who had the whole shire in their hands, and were allowed to hold their own courts of justice and raise the taxation of the district, like the counts of the continent. These exceptional grants were made because they were frontier shires, and the earls were intended to be bulwarks against the king's enemies--Chester and Shropshire against the Welsh, and Durham against the Scots.

[Sidenote: =The sheriffs.=]

In the rest of England the king kept the local government entirely in his own hands, using the sheriffs (shire-reeves), who had existed since the early days of the kings of Wessex, as his deputies. It was the sheriff who raised the taxes, led the military levy of the shire to war, and presided in the law courts of the district. The sheriffs, whom the king nominated as men whom he could completely trust, were the chief check on the earls and barons. Their office was not hereditary; they were purely dependent on the king, and he displaced them at his pleasure. By their means, William kept the government of England entirely in his own hands, and never allowed his greater vassals to trench upon his royal rights.

[Sidenote: =Doctrine of direct allegiance to the crown.=]

William also enunciated a most important doctrine, which clashed with the continental theory of feudalism. He insisted that every man's duty to the king outweighed that to his immediate feudal suzerain. If any lord opposed the king and bade his vassals follow him, the vassals would be committing high treason if they consented to do so. Their allegiance to the crown was more binding than that which they owed to their local baron or earl.

Although, then, the Norman conquest turned England into a feudal hierarchy, where the villein did homage to the knight, the knight to the earl, the earl to the king, yet the strength of the royal power gained rather than lost by the change. William was far more the master of his barons than was St. Edward of his great earls like Godwine or Siward. And this was not merely owing to the fact that William was a strong and Edward a weak man, but much more to the new political arrangements of the realm. William never allowed an earl to rule more than one shire, while Godwine or Leofric had ruled six or seven. William's sheriffs were a firm check on the local magnates, while Edward's had been no more than the king's local bailiffs. Moreover, there were many counties where William made no earl at all, and where his sheriff was therefore the sole representative of authority.

[Sidenote: =The Great Council.=]

The kingly power, too, was as much strengthened in the central as in the local government. The Saxon Witan had represented the nation as opposed to the king: it had an existence independent of him, and we have even seen it depose kings. The Norman "Great Council," on the other hand, which superseded the Witan,[8] was simply the assembly of the king's vassals called up by him to give him advice. Though the class of persons who were summoned to it was much the same as those who had appeared at the Witan--bishops, earls, and so forth--yet they now came, not as "the wise men of England," but as the king's personal vassals, his "tenants-in-chief." All who held land directly from the crown might appear if they chose, but as a matter of fact it was only the greater men who came; the knights and other small freeholders would not as a rule visit an assembly where their importance was small and their advice was not asked.

[Sidenote: =William and the Church.--Ecclesiastical Courts.=]

William's hand was felt almost as much by the Church as by the State. He began by clearing away, one after another, all the English bishops; Wulfstan of Worcester, a simple old man of very holy life, was ere long the sole survivor of the old hierarchy. Their places were filled by Normans and other foreigners, the primatial seat of Canterbury being placed in the hands of Lanfranc of Pavia, a learned Italian monk who had long been a royal chaplain, and had afterwards been made Abbot of Bec; he was always the best and most merciful of the king's counsellors. William and Lanfranc brought England into closer touch with the continental Church than had been known in earlier days. This was but natural when we remember that it was with the Pope's blessing and under his consecrated banner that the land had been conquered. The new Norman bishops continued Dunstan's old policy of favouring the monks at the expense of the secular clergy, and of establishing everywhere strict rules of clerical discipline. Their stern asceticism was not without its use, for the English clergy had of late grown somewhat lax in life, and unspiritual and worldly in their aims. It was with Lanfranc's aid that William took a step in the organization of the Church that was destined to be a sore trouble to his successors in later days. Hitherto offences against the law of the Church had been tried in the secular courts, and this was not felt to be a grievance by the clergy, because the bishops and abbots both sat in the Witan and attended the meetings of the local shire courts, where such offences--bigamy, for example, or perjury, or witchcraft, or heresy--were tried. But William and Lanfranc now gave the bishops separate Church courts of their own, and withdrew the inquiry into all ecclesiastical cases from the king's court. Though William did not grasp the fact, he was thus erecting an institution which might easily turn against the royal power, as the ecclesiastical judges in their new courts were not under the control of the crown, and had no reason to consult the king's interests. But in William's own time the Church-courts gave no trouble, for they had not yet learnt their power, and the bishops dreaded the king's arm too much to offend him. For William was no slave of the Church; when Pope Gregory VII. bade him do homage to the papacy for his English crown, because he had won England under the papal blessing, he sturdily refused. He announced also that he would outlaw any cleric who carried appeals or complaints to Rome without his permission, and he forbade the clergy to excommunicate any one of his knights for any ecclesiastical offence, unless the royal permission were first obtained.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of Earls of Norfolk and Hereford.--Execution of Waltheof.=]

We have already mentioned the fact that in the last fifteen years of his reign William had little or no trouble with his English subjects. But his life was far from being an easy one; he had both foreign enemies to meet and a turbulent baronage to keep down. Many of the new earls and barons were not born subjects of William, but Flemings, French, or Bretons, who looked upon him as merely the chief partner in their common enterprise of the conquest of England; even among the Normans themselves many were turbulent and disloyal. Within ten years of the Conquest, the king had to take arms against a rebellion of some of his own followers. Ralf, Earl of Norfolk, and Roger, Earl of Hereford, took counsel against him, and tried to enlist in their plot Waltheof, the last surviving English Earl. "Let one of us be king, and the two others great dukes, and so rule all England," was their suggestion to him, when they had gathered all their friends together under the pretence of Earl Ralf's marriage feast. Waltheof refused to join the rebellion, but thought himself in honour bound not to disclose the conspiracy to the king. When the two earls took arms they soon found that William was too strong for them. Ralf fled over sea; Roger was taken and imprisoned for life. Of their followers, some were blinded and some banished. But the hardest measure was dealt out to Earl Waltheof, whose only crime had been his silence. William was anxious to get rid of the last great English territorial magnate; he tried Waltheof for treason before the Great Council, and, when he was condemned, had him at once executed at Winchester (1076). His earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon were, however, allowed to pass to his daughter, who married a Norman, Simon of St. Liz.

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of William's son Robert.=]

Some few years after the abortive rising of Ralf and Roger, the king found worse enemies in his own household. His eldest son and heir, Robert, began to importune him to grant him some of his lands to rule, and begged for the duchy of Normandy. But William was wroth, and drove him away with words of sarcastic reproof. The headstrong young man fled from his father's court and took refuge with Philip, the French king, William's nominal suzerain. Supported by money and men from France, Robert made war upon his father, and defeated him at the fight of Gerberoi (1079). Both father and son rode in the forefront of the battle. They met without knowing each other, and William was unhorsed and wounded by his son's lance. Only the courage of an English thegn, Tokig of Wallingford, who gave his horse to his fallen master, and received a mortal wound while helping him to make off, saved William from death. It must be added that Robert was deeply moved when he learnt how near he had been to slaying his own father, and then he immediately after sought pardon, and received it. But he had lost the first place in the king's heart, which was given to his second son William, whose fidelity was always unshaken. Robert was not the only kinsman of the Conqueror who justly incurred his wrath. His brother Bishop Odo angered him sorely by his cruel and oppressive treatment of Northumbria, and still more by raising a private army to make war over-seas; William seized him and kept him shut up in prison as long as he lived.

[Sidenote: =Threatened Danish invasion.=]

Disputes with foreign powers also arose to vex William's later years. In 1084, Cnut, King of Denmark, threatened to invade the island, and such a heavy Danegelt was raised to pay the mercenary army which the king levied against him, that it is said that no such grievous tax had ever before been raised in England. Yet Cnut never came, being slain by his own people ere he sailed. Less threatening, but more perpetually troublesome than the danger of a Danish invasion, were William's broils with Philip of France, who even in time of peace was always stirring up strife. But Philip, though nominally ruler of all France, was practically too weak to cope with William, since his authority was quietly disregarded by most of the counts and dukes who owned him as liege lord.

[Sidenote: =Domesday Book.=]

It was probably the difficulty that had been found in raising men and money to resist the expected Danish invasion of 1084, that led William to order the compilation of the celebrated Domesday Book in 1085. This great statistical account of the condition of England was drawn up by commissioners sent down into every shire to make inquiry into its resources, population, and ownership. Therein was set down the name of every landholder, with the valuation of his manors, and an account of the service and money due from him to the king. It did not give merely a rent-roll of the estates, but a complete enumeration of the population, divided up by status into tenants-in-chief of the crown, sub-tenants who held under these greater landowners, burgesses of towns, free "sokmen," villeins, and serfs of lower degrees. Under each manor was given not only the name of its present holder and its actual value, but also a notice of its proprietor in the time of King Edward the Confessor, and of its value at Edward's death. This enables us to form an exact estimate of the change in the ownership of the lands of England brought about by the Conquest. We see that of the great English earls and magnates not a single one survived; all their lands had been confiscated and given away at one time or another. Of the thegns of lower degree some still retained their land, and had become the king's tenants-in-chief; many had sunk into sub-tenants of a Norman baron, instead of holding their estate directly from the crown; but still more had lost their heritage altogether. In some counties, especially in the south-east, where the whole thegnhood had fallen at Hastings, hardly a single English proprietor survived. In others, such for example as Wiltshire or Nottingham, a large proportion of the old owners remained; but, on the whole, we gather that three-quarters of the acreage of England must have changed masters between 1066 and 1085. We discover also that while some parts of England had suffered little in material prosperity from the troublous times of the Conquest, others had been completely ruined. Yorkshire shows the worst record, a result of William's cruel harrying of the land in 1070; manor after manor is recorded as "waste," and the whole county shows a population less by far than that of the small shire of Berks.

[Sidenote: =The great Moot of Salisbury.=]

Having ascertained by the completion of Domesday Book the exact names, status, and obligations of all the landholders of England, William used his knowledge to bid them all come to the Great Moot of Salisbury in 1086, where every landed proprietor, whether tenant-in-chief or sub-tenant, did personal homage to the king, and swore to follow him in all wars, even against his own feudal superior if need should so arise.

[Sidenote: =Death of William.=]

Two years after the compilation of the Domesday survey, and one year after the Great Oath of Salisbury, the troubled and busy reign of William came to an end. The king died, as he had lived, amid the alarms of war. He was always at odds with his suzerain, the King of France, since Philip had done him the evil turn of encouraging the rebellion of his son Robert. In 1087, William was lying ill at Rouen, when the report of a coarse jest that Philip had made on his increasing corpulence raised him in wrath from his sick-bed. He headed in person a raid into France, and sacked the town of Mantes, but while he watched his men burn the place, the king came to deadly harm. His horse, singed by a blazing beam, reared and plunged so that William received severe internal injuries from being thrown against the high pommel of his saddle. He was borne back to Rouen, and died there, deserted by well-nigh all his knights and attendants, who had rushed off in haste when they saw his death draw near. Even his burial was unseemly: when his corpse was borne to the abbey at Caen, which he had founded, a certain knight withstood the funeral procession, crying that the ground where the abbey stood had been forcibly taken from him by the king. Nor would he depart till the estimated value of the land had been paid over to him.

Thus ended King William, a man prudent, untiring, and brave, and one who was pious and just according to his own lights, for he governed Church and State as one who deemed that he had an account to render for his deeds. But he was so unscrupulous in his ambition, so ruthless in sweeping away all who stood in his path, so much a stranger to pity and mercy, that he was feared rather than loved by his subjects, Norman as well as English. No man could pardon such acts as his harrying of Yorkshire, or forget his cruel forest laws, which inflicted death or mutilation on all who interfered with his royal pleasure of the chase. "He loved the tall deer as if he was their father," it was said, and ill did it fare with the unhappy subject who came between him and the favoured beasts. England has had many kings who were worse men than William the Bastard, but never one who brought her more sorrow, from the moment that he set foot on the shore of Sussex down to the day of his death.

THE HOUSE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR, 1066-1087. | +------------+-----------+--+--------------------+ | | | | Robert, WILLIAM II., HENRY I., = Matilda of Adela = Stephen of Duke of 1087-1100. 1100-1135. | Scotland. | Blois. Normandy. | | | | | William | | Clito. | | +--------+------------------+ +---+-----+ | | | | William. Matilda = (1) Henry V., Emperor. STEPHEN, Henry, | (2) Geoffrey of Anjou. 1135-1154. Bishop of | | Winchester. | +-----+----+ Eleanor of = HENRY II., | | Aquitaine. | 1154-1189. Eustace. William. | +-------------+-----------+-------------------------+ | | | | Henry the RICHARD I., Geoffrey = Constance of JOHN, Younger. 1189-1199. | Brittany. 1199-1216. | | Arthur of Brittany. | | +--------------------+-------+ | | HENRY III., Richard of Cornwall, 1216-1272. King of the Romans. | | EDWARD I. Henry of Cornwall.

FOOTNOTE:

[8] The native English writers, for some time after the Conquest, continued to call it the Witan, merely because they had as yet found no other name for it.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII. WILLIAM THE RED--HENRY I.--STEPHEN

1087-1154.

The eighty years which followed the death of William the Conqueror were spent in the solution of the problem which he had left behind him. William had brought over to England two principles of conflicting tendency--the one that of strong monarchical government, where everything depends on the king; the other that of feudal anarchy. He himself had been able to control the turbulent horde of military adventurers among whom he had distributed the lands of England, but would his sons be equally successful? We have now to see how two strong-handed kings kept down the monster of feudal rebellion; how one weak king's reign sufficed to put the monarchy in the gravest danger; and how, finally, William's great-grandson quelled the unruly baronage so that it was never again a serious danger for the rest of England's national life.

[Sidenote: =William's sons.=]

William had left behind him three sons. To Robert the eldest, the rebel of 1079, he had bequeathed, not the English crown, but his own ancient heritage of Normandy. William the Red, the second son, who had always been his father's loyal helper, was to be King of England. Henry, the youngest son, was left only a legacy of £5000; the Conqueror would not parcel out his dominions any further, but said that his latest-born was too capable a man not to make his own way in the world.

[Sidenote: =Risings of the barons.--Loyalty of the English.=]

William the Red hurried over to England the moment that the breath was out of his father's body, and was duly crowned by Lanfranc the archbishop. But it was no easy heritage that he took up; the Conqueror's death was the instant signal for the outbreak of feudal anarchy. All the more turbulent of the Norman barons and bishops, headed by Odo of Bayeux, who had just been released from prison, took arms, garrisoned their castles, and began to harass their neighbours. They made it their pretext that Duke Robert, as the eldest son, ought to succeed his father in all his dominions; but their true reason for espousing his cause was that Robert was known to be a weak and shiftless personage, under whose rule every great man would be able to do whatever he might please. In order to defeat this rising William the Red took the bold step of throwing himself upon the loyalty of the native English. He summoned out the militia of the shires, proclaiming that every man who did not follow his king to the field should be held nithing, a worthless coward, and promising that he would lighten his father's heavy yoke and rule with a gentle and merciful hand. The fyrd turned out in unexpected strength and loyalty, and with its aid William put down all the Norman rebels, and drove them out of the realm. Duke Robert, who had prepared to come to their aid, was too late, and had to return to his duchy foiled and shamed.

[Sidenote: =Character and policy of William II.=]

William's promise that he would be a good and easy lord to his subjects was not kept for long. The new king was in all things an evil copy of his father: he had William's courage and ability, but none of his better moral qualities; he had no sense of justice, and was not restrained by any religious scruples. He was, indeed, an open atheist, and scoffed at all forms of religion, scornfully observing that he would become a Jew if it was made worth his while. Moreover, his private life was infamous, and no man who cared for honour or purity could abide at his court.

Nevertheless, his government was far more tolerable than the anarchy of baronial rule would have been. If he sheared his subjects close himself, he took care that no one else should molest them, and one bad master is always better than many. Under him England was cruelly taxed, and many isolated acts of oppression were committed, but he put down civil war, overcame his foreign enemies, and ruled victoriously for all his days.

[Sidenote: =War with Scotland.--Cumberland finally becomes English.=]

Of William's exploits, those which were the most profitable for the peace of England were his enterprises against the Scots and the Welsh. Malcolm Canmore, though he had done homage to William I., repeatedly led armies into England against William's son. In this first Scottish war the Red King, though his fleet was destroyed by a storm, compelled Malcolm to submit, and took from him the city of Carlisle and the district of Cumberland. This land, the southern half of the old Welsh principality of Strathclyde, had been tributary to the Scots ever since King Edmund granted it to Malcolm I. in 945. It now became an English county and bishopric, and the border of England was fixed at the Solway, and no longer at the hills of the Lake District (1092). Only a year later the Scottish king again invaded England, but was slain at Alnwick. He ran into an ambush which the Earl of Northumberland laid for him, and fell; with him died his son Edward and the best of his knights. The Scottish crown passed, after much fighting and contention, to Eadgar, Malcolm's second son by his English wife Margaret, the sister of Eadgar the Etheling. This prince, trained up by his pious and able mother, and aided and counselled by his uncle the Etheling, was the first King of Scotland who spoke English as his native tongue, and made the Lowlands his favourite abode. He surrounded himself with English followers, and ceased to be a mere Celtic lord of the Highlands, as his fathers had been.

[Sidenote: =South Wales partly occupied by the Normans.=]

William the Red's arms were as successful against Wales as against Scotland. During his reign the southern half of the land of the Cymry was overrun by Norman barons, who won for themselves new lordships beyond the Wye and Severn, and did homage for them to the king. Many of these adventurers married into the families of the South Welsh princes, and became the inheritors of their local power. In North Wales the Normans pushed across the Dee, and built great castles at Rhuddlan and Flint and Montgomery, but they could not win the mountainous districts about Snowdon, where the native chiefs still maintained a precarious independence.

[Sidenote: =William obtains possession of Normandy.=]

Beyond the British seas William waged constant war with his brother Robert, and always had the better of his elder, for the duke, though a brave soldier, was a very incapable ruler, and lost by his shiftless negligence all that he gained by his sword. He was forced in 1091 to cede several of his towns to William, and to promise to make him his heir if he should die without male issue. But in 1096 the king gained possession of the whole, and not a mere fraction, of the Norman duchy. For Robert, seized with a sudden access of piety and a spirit of wandering and unrest, vowed to go off to the First Crusade, which was then being preached. In order to get the money to fit out a large army, he unwisely mortgaged the whole of his lands to his grasping brother for the very moderate sum of £6666. So William ruled Normandy for a space, and Robert went off with half the baronage of Western Christendom, to deliver the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks, and to set up a Christian kingdom in Palestine. Among his companions were the Etheling Eadgar, and many Englishmen more. The duke fought so gallantly against the infidel that the Crusaders offered him the crown of Jerusalem; but he would have none of it, and set his face homeward after four years of absence (1099).

[Sidenote: =William's extortions.--Quarrel with the Church.--Anselm.=]

King William meanwhile had been ruling both England and Normandy with a high hand. He and his favourite minister, Ralf Flambard, had been devising all manner of new ways for raising money. When a tenant of the crown died, they would not let his son or heir succeed to his estate till he had paid an extortionate fine to the king. When a bishop or an abbot died, they kept his place empty for months--or even for years--and confiscated all the revenues of the see or abbey during the vacancy. It was on this question that there broke out the celebrated quarrel between William the Red and Archbishop Anselm. When Lanfranc, his father's wise counsellor, died in 1089, the king left the see of Canterbury unfilled for nearly four years, and embezzled its revenues. But, being stricken with illness in 1093, he had a moment of compunction, and filled up the archbishopric by appointing Anselm, Abbot of Bec. Anselm, like his predecessor Lanfranc, was a learned and pious Italian monk, who had governed his Norman abbey so well that he won the respect of all his neighbours. He was only persuaded with difficulty to accept the position of head of the English Church. "Will you couple me, a poor weak old sheep, to that fierce young bull the King of England?" he asked, when the bishops came to offer him the primacy. But they forced the pastoral staff into his hands, and hurried him off to be installed. When William recovered from his sickness he began to ask large sums of money from Anselm, in return for the piece of preferment that he had received. The king called this exacting his feudal dues, but the archbishop called it simony, the ancient crime of Simon Magus, who offered gold to the apostles to buy spiritual privileges. He sent £500, but when the king asked for more, utterly refused to comply. From this time forth there was constant strife between William and Anselm, the first beginning of that intermittent war between the crown and the Church which was to last for more than two centuries. The archbishop was always withstanding the king. When two popes disputed the tiara at Rome, William refused to acknowledge either; but Anselm would not allow that there was any doubt, did homage to Urban, and thus forced the king's hand by committing England to one side in the dispute. When Urban sent over to Anselm the pall,[9] the sign of his metropolitan jurisdiction over the island, the king wished to deliver it to the archbishop with his own hands. But Anselm vowed that this was receiving spiritual things from a secular master, and would not take it save with his own hands and from the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. Nor did he cease denouncing the ill living of the king and his courtiers, till William grew so wrath that he would have slain him, had not all England revered the fearless archbishop as a saint. At last he found a way of molesting Anselm under form of law: he declared that the lands of the see of Canterbury had not sent an adequate feudal contingent to his Welsh wars, and imposed enormous fines on the archbishop for a breach of his duties as a tenant-in-chief of the crown. Soon afterwards Anselm left the realm, abandoning the king to his own devices as incorrigible, and took his way to Pope Urban at Rome; nor did he return till William was dead.

[Sidenote: =Death of William II.=]

The end of the Red King was sudden and tragic. He was hunting in the New Forest--the great tract in Hampshire which his father had cleared of its inhabitants and turned into one vast deer-park--and he had chanced to draw apart from all his followers save Walter Tyrrel, one of his chief favourites. A great hart came bounding between them. The king loosed an arrow at it, and missed; "Shoot, Walter, shoot in the devil's name!" he cried. Tyrrel shot in haste, but missed the stag and pierced his master to the heart. Leaving William dead on the ground, he galloped off to the shore and took ship for the continent. William's corpse lay lost in the wood till a charcoal-burner came upon it next day, and bore it in his cart to Winchester. Such was the strange funeral procession of the lord of England and Normandy. William's death grieved none save his favourites and boon companions, for his manner of living was hateful to all good men, and his taxes and extortions had turned from him the hearts of all his subjects (August 2, 1100).

[Sidenote: =Election of Henry I.--His charter.=]

When the throne of England was thus suddenly left vacant, it remained to be seen who would become William's successor. His elder brother Robert, whom the baronage would have preferred, because of his slackness and easy ways, was still far away, on his return journey from the Crusade. But Henry, his younger brother, was on the spot, and knew how to take advantage of the opportunity. Hastily assembling the few members of the Great Council who were near at hand, he prevailed upon them by bribes or promises to elect him king, and was proclaimed at Winchester only three days after William's death, and long before the news that the throne was vacant had reached the turbulent barons of the North and West. After his proclamation at Winchester, Henry moved to London, and there was crowned. He did his best to win the good opinion of all his subjects by issuing a charter of promises to the nation, wherein he bound himself to abide by "the laws of Edward the Confessor," that is, the ancient customs of England, and not to ask of any man more than his due share of taxation--agreeing to abandon the arbitrary and illegal fines on succession to heritages which William II. had always exacted. He then proceeded to fill up all the abbeys and bishoprics which William had kept vacant for his own profit, to recall Anselm from his exile, and to cast into prison Ralf Flambard,[10] the chief instrument of his brother's oppression and extortions.

[Sidenote: =War with the baronage.=]

Henry's conciliatory measures were not taken a moment too soon. He had but just time to announce his good intentions, and to give some earnest of his desire to carry them out, when he found himself involved in a desperate civil war. The barons had broken loose, headed by Robert of Belesme, the turbulent Earl of Shrewsbury, and they were set on making Duke Robert King of England. Robert, indeed, had just returned from Palestine, and had retaken possession of his duchy shortly after his brother's death. He planned an invasion of England to assist his partisans, and began to collect an army.

But the new king was too much for his shiftless brother. When Robert landed at Portsmouth, he bought him off for a moment by offering him a tribute of £3000, an irresistible bribe to the impecunious duke, and then used his opportunity to crush the rebellious barons. The fate of the rising was settled by the next summer. Gathering together the English shire levies and those of the baronage who were faithful to him, the king marched against Robert of Belesme and his associates. The successful sieges of Arundel and Bridgenorth decided the war: Robert was forced to surrender, and granted his life on condition of forfeiting his estates and leaving the realm. "Rejoice, King Henry, for now may you truly say that you are lord of England," cried the English levies to their monarch, "since you have put down Robert of Belesme, and driven him out of the bounds of your kingdom" (1101).

[Sidenote: =Marriage of Henry to Matilda of Scotland.=]

So Henry retained the crown that he had seized, and set to work to strengthen his position in the land. He did his best to conciliate the native English by marrying, five months after his accession, a princess of the old royal house of King Alfred. The lady was Eadgyth, or Matilda as the Normans re-named her, the daughter of Malcolm, the King of Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar the Etheling. So the issue of King Henry, and all his descendants who sat on the English throne, had the blood of the ancient kings of Wessex in their veins. Some of the Normans mocked at this marriage, and at the anxiety which Henry showed to please his native-born subjects, and nicknamed him "Godric," an English name which sounded uncouth to their own ears. But the king heeded not, when he got so much solid advantage from his conduct, and the prosperity of his reign justified his wisdom.

[Sidenote: =Fusion of English and Norman races.=]

Henry showed himself his father's true son, reproducing the good as well as the evil qualities of the Conqueror. He had the advantage over his father of having been born in England, and of living in a generation when the first bitterness of the strife of races was beginning to be assuaged. If he was selfish and hard-hearted and often cruel, yet he dispensed even-handed justice, curbed all oppressors, and kept to the letter of the law. He made so little difference between Norman and Englishman that the two races soon began to melt together: intermarriage between them became common in all classes save the highest nobility; the English thegns and yeomen began to christen their children by Norman names, while the Anglo-Normans began to learn English, and to draw apart from their kindred beyond the sea in the old duchy. Thirty years after Henry's death, it was remarked by a contemporary writer that no man could say that he was either Norman or English, so much had the two races become intermingled. Much of the benefit of this happy union must be laid to the credit of Henry himself, who both set the example of wedding a wife of English blood, and treated all his men of either race as equal before his eyes. Nor was he averse to granting a larger measure of liberty to his subjects: his charter to the city of London, issued in 1100, was a very liberal grant of self-government to the burghers of his capital, and served as a model ever after to his successors when they gave privileges to their town-dwelling liegemen. He allowed the Londoners to raise their own taxes, to choose their own sheriffs, and to make bye-laws for their municipal government.

[Sidenote: =Character of Henry.=]

But Henry's character had a bad side: he was at times as ruthlessly cruel as his father; he punished not only rebellion, but theft and offences against the forest laws, by death, or blinding, or mutilation. Once, when he found that the workmen of his mints had conspired together to issue base coins, he struck off the right hand of every moneyer in England. We shall see that he was capable of holding his own brother in close prison for thirty years. He was as grasping and avaricious as his predecessor William, though he was much less arbitrary and harsh in his exactions. His private life, though not a patent scandal like that of the Red King, was open to grave reproach. Above all things he was selfish; his own advantage was his aim, and if he governed the land wisely and justly, it was mainly because he thought that wisdom and justice were the best policy for himself.

[Sidenote: =Strength of the monarchy.--=]

Henry's long reign (1100-1135) was more noteworthy for the tendencies which were at work in it, than for the particular events which mark its individual years. It is mainly important as the time of the silent growth together of Norman and English, and the stereotyping of the constitution on a strong monarchical basis. In his day the king was everything, and the Great Council of tenants-in-chief was no check on him, and did little more than register his decrees. If his successors had all been like himself, England might have become a pure despotism, though one well ordered and--considering the lights of the times--not oppressively administered.

[Sidenote: =Fresh disputes with the Church.=]

The strife between the monarchy and the Church, which had first taken shape in the quarrel of William Rufus and Anselm, continued in Henry's time, but raged on a new point of issue. When the archbishop returned from exile, he refused to take the usual oath of homage, and to be reinvested in his see by the new king, alleging that, as a spiritual person, he owed fealty to God alone, and received all his power and authority from God, and not from the king. This new and strange doctrine he had picked up in Rome during his exile: the papacy was at this time putting forth those monstrous claims to dominion over kings and princes with which it had been inspired a few years before by the imperious Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII.). Henry could only reply that, though the archbishop was a spiritual person, he was also a great tenant-in-chief, holding vast estates, and that for them he must do homage to the crown, like all other feudal landowners. Anselm refused, and there the matter stood still, for neither would yield, though they treated each other courteously enough, and did not indulge in the angry recrimination which had been wont to take place when Rufus was in Henry's place. Anselm even went into exile again for a space. But at last he and the king met at Bec, in Normandy, in 1106, and hit on a wise compromise, which they agreed to apply both to Anselm's case and to all future investitures of bishops. The newly elected prelate was to do homage, as a feudal tenant, for the estates of his see; but he was not to receive the symbols of his spiritual authority from the king, but was to take up his ring and crozier from the high altar of his cathedral, as direct gifts from God. This decision served as a model for the agreement between the Pope and the empire, when fourteen years later the "Contest about Investiture," as this widespread dispute was called, was brought to an end on the continent.

[Sidenote: =Wars with Duke Robert.--Partial conquest of Normandy.=]

The chief incidents in the foreign relations of Henry's reign are his long wars with his shiftless brother Robert, and afterwards with Robert's son, William Clito. He had never forgiven the duke for his attempt to dethrone him by the aid of rebels in 1099; nor did the duke ever forgive him for having so promptly seized England at the moment of the death of William II. The peace which they had made in 1100 did not endure, and a long series of hostilities at last culminated in the battle of Tinchebrai (1106). Here Henry, who had invaded Normandy, completely defeated his brother and took him prisoner. He sent the unfortunate Robert to strict confinement in Cardiff Castle, and kept him there all the days of his life. For the rest of his reign Henry ruled Normandy as well as England, but his dominion in the duchy was very precarious. The baronage hated his strong hand and his strict enforcement of the law. They often rebelled against him, but he never failed to subdue them. When William, surnamed Clito, the son of the imprisoned duke, grew towards man's estate, he had no difficulty in finding partisans in Normandy who would do their best to win him back his father's heritage. Aided by the King of France, who was one of Henry's most consistent enemies, William Clito made several bold attempts to deprive his uncle of Normandy. He did not succeed, but presently he became Count of Flanders, to which he had a claim through his grandmother Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror. Possessed of this rich country, he grew to be a more serious danger to the English king, but he fell in battle in 1128, while striving with some Flemish rebels, and by his death Henry's position became unassailable.

[Sidenote: =Marriage of Princess Matilda to Geoffrey of Anjou.=]

The King of England was troubled with many other enemies beside William Clito. Lewis VI. of France, and Fulk, Count of Anjou, were always molesting him. But he gained or lost little by his long and dreary border wars with them. The one noteworthy consequence of this strife was that, to confirm a peace with Count Fulk, the king married his two children to the son and daughter of the lord of Anjou. First, his son William was wedded to the count's daughter (1119), and some years later the Lady Matilda was married to Geoffrey, the count's son and heir (1127).

[Sidenote: =Death of Henry's son.--Matilda heiress to the throne.=]

The importance of this latter marriage lay in the fact that Prince William had died in the intervening space, and that Matilda--a widowed princess whose first husband had been the Emperor Henry V.--was now the King of England's sole heiress. The end of her brother had been strange and tragic: he was following his father from Normandy to England, when a drunken skipper ran his vessel upon the reef of Catteville, only five miles from the Norman shore. The prince was hurried by his followers into the only boat that the ship possessed, and might have escaped, had he not seen that his half-sister, the Countess of Perche,[11] had been left behind. He bade the oarsmen put back, but when they reached the ship, a crowd of panic-stricken passengers sprang down into the boat and swamped it. The prince was drowned, and with him his half-brother Richard, his half-sister the Countess of Perche, the Earl of Chester, and many of the chief persons of the realm. Only one sailor-lad survived to tell the sad tale of the White Ship. When the news of the death of his only legitimate son reached the king, he was prostrated by it for many days, and it was said that he was never seen to smile again, though he lived for fifteen years after the disaster. But, if the chronicles speak true, the death of William was more of a loss to his father than to the realm, for they report him to have been a proud and cruel youth, who bid fair to reproduce some of the evil qualities of his uncle William Rufus.

Henry was determined that his realm should pass at his death to his daughter Matilda, and not to any of his nephews, the sons of William the Conqueror's daughters. But he knew that it would be a hard matter to secure her succession, for England had never been ruled by a queen-regnant, and it was very doubtful if the Great Council would elect a woman. Moreover, the barons grudged that she should have been married to a foreign count, for they had hoped that the king would have given her hand to one of his own earls. Henry endeavoured to support Matilda's cause by constraining all the chief men of the realm, and his own kinsfolk, to take an oath to choose her as queen after his death. But he well knew that oaths sworn under compulsion are lightly esteemed, and must have foreseen that on his death his daughter would have great difficulty in asserting her claims.

[Sidenote: =Complete conquest of South Wales.--Scotland.=]

But, trusting his daughter's fate to the future, Henry persevered in his life's work, and left his kingdom behind him at his death in 1135 with a full treasury, an obedient baronage, and largely extended borders. Not only had he won Normandy, but he had completed the conquest of South Wales, and established large colonies of English and Flemings about Pembroke and in the peninsula of Gower. With his three brothers-in-law, who reigned in Scotland one after another, he dwelt on friendly terms; they did him homage, and he left them unmolested. They were wise princes who knew the value of peace, and under them the Scotch kingdom advanced in civilization and wealth, and grew more and more assimilated to its great southern neighbour.

On the 1st of December, 1135, King Henry died. Though a selfish and unscrupulous man, he had been a good king, and the troubles which followed his death soon taught the English how much they had owed to his strong and ruthless hand.

[Sidenote: =Stephen elected king.=]

Immediately on the arrival of the news of his death, the Great Council met at London. It was soon evident that many of its members thought little of the oath that they had sworn ten years before. One after another they declared that the reign of a queen would be unprecedented and intolerable, and that a man must be chosen to rule over England. Of the male members of the royal house the one who was best known in England was Stephen of Blois, one of the late king's nephews, and the son of Adela, a daughter of William I., who had wedded the Count of Blois and Champagne. He had been the late king's favourite kinsman, and had taken the oath to uphold Matilda's rights before any of the lay members of the council. Now he lightly forgot his vow, and stood forward as a candidate for the crown. Matilda was absent abroad, and her husband Geoffrey of Anjou was much disliked, so that it was not difficult for Henry, Bishop of Winchester, Stephen's younger brother, to prevail on the majority of the magnates of the realm to reject her claim. In spite of the murmurings of a large minority, Stephen was chosen as king, and duly crowned at London, whose citizens liked him well, and hailed his accession with shouts of joy.

[Sidenote: =Aims of the baronage.--Civil war begins.=]

They were soon to change their tone, for ere long Stephen began to show that he was too weak for the task that he had undertaken. He was a good-natured, impulsive, volatile man, who could never refuse a friend's request, or keep an unspent penny in his purse. Save personal courage, he had not one of the qualities of a successful king. The baronage soon took the measure of Stephen's abilities, and saw that the time had come for them to make a bold strike for that anarchical feudal independence which was their dream. The name and cause of Matilda gave them an excellent excuse for throwing up their allegiance, and doing every man that which was right in his own eyes. The king put down a few spasmodic rebellions, but more kept breaking out, till in the third year of his reign a general explosion took place (1138). The cause of the Lady Matilda was taken up by two honest partisans, her uncle David, King of Scotland, and her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester;[12] but these two were aided by a host of turbulent self-seeking barons, who craved nothing save an excuse for defying the king and plundering their neighbours.

[Sidenote: =The Scottish invasion.--Battle of the Standard.=]

The Scot was the first to move; he crossed the Tweed with a great army, giving out that he came to make King Stephen grant him justice in the matter of the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton, which he claimed as the heir of the long-dead Earl Waltheof.[13] But the wild Highland clans that followed David ravaged Northumbria so cruelly that the barons and yeomen of Yorkshire turned out in great wrath to strike a blow for King Stephen. At Northallerton they barred the way of the invaders, mustering under Thurstan, Archbishop of York, and the two sheriffs of the county. They placed in their midst a car bearing the consecrated standards of the three Yorkshire saints--St. Peter of York, St. Wilfred of Ripon, and St. John of Beverley. Around it they stood in serried ranks, and beat off again and again the wild charges of the Highlanders and Galloway men who formed the bulk of King David's army. More than 10,000 Scots fell, and Yorkshire was saved; but the war was only just beginning (1138).

A few months after the Battle of the Standard the English partisans of Matilda took arms, headed by her brother, Earl Robert. Gloucester, Bristol, Hereford, Exeter, and most of the south-west of England at once fell into their hands. Stephen did his best to make head against them, by the aid of such of the baronage as adhered to him, and of great bodies of plundering mercenaries raised in Flanders and France. He bought off the opposition of the Scots by ceding Northumberland and Cumberland to Henry, the son of King David, who was to hold them as his vassal, and for the rest of Stephen's reign the two northern counties were in Scottish hands.

[Sidenote: =Victory of Matilda at Lincoln.=]

But at this critical moment the king ruined his own cause by a quarrel with the Church. He threw into prison the Bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln, because they refused to surrender their castles into his keeping, and treated them so roughly that every ecclesiastic in the realm--even including his own brother, Henry, Bishop of Winchester--took part against him (1139). Soon afterward Matilda landed in Sussex, and all the southern counties fell away to her. After much irregular fighting, the two parties came to a pitched battle at Lincoln. In spite of the feats of personal bravery which Stephen displayed, he was utterly defeated, and fell into the hands of his enemies (1141).

The cause of Matilda now seemed triumphant. She had captured her enemy, and most of the realm fell into her hands. She was saluted as "Lady of England" at Winchester, and there received the homage of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and most of the barons and bishops of the land. She then moved to London, to be crowned; but in the short space since her triumph she had shown herself so haughty, impracticable, and vindictive that men's minds were already turning against her. Most especially did she provoke Stephen's old partisans, by refusing to release him on his undertaking to quit the kingdom and formally resign his claims to the crown. This refusal led to the continuation of the war: Maud of Boulogne, Stephen's wife, rallied the wrecks of his party and continued to make resistance, and on the news of her approach the Londoners commenced to stir. Their new mistress had celebrated her advent by imposing a crushing tallage, or money-fine, on the city, and in wrath at her extortion the citizens rose in arms and chased her out of the place, before she had even been crowned.

[Sidenote: =Reverses of Matilda.--Feudal anarchy.=]

The unhappy civil war--which for a moment had seemed at an end--now commenced again. Matilda steadily lost ground, and had to release Stephen in exchange for her brother, Robert of Gloucester, who had fallen into the hands of the king's party. She was besieged first at Winchester, then at Oxford, and on each occasion escaped with great difficulty from her adversaries. At Oxford she had to be let down by a rope at night from the castle keep, to thread her way through the hostile outposts, and then to walk on foot many miles over the snow.

The baronage were so well content with the practical independence which they enjoyed during the civil war, that they had no desire to see it end. They changed from side to side with the most indecent shamelessness, only taking care that at each change they got a full price for their treachery. Geoffrey de Mandeville, the wicked Earl of Essex, was perhaps the worst of them; he sold each party in turn, and finally fought for his own hand, taking no heed of king or queen, and only seeking to plunder his neighbours and annex their lands. He had many imitators; the last pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which finally comes to an end in Stephen's reign, are filled with a picture of the hopeless misery of the land. Every shire, it laments, was full of castles, and every castle was filled with devils and evil men. The lords took any weaker neighbours who were thought to have money, and put them in dungeons, and tortured them with unutterable devices. "The ancient martyrs were not so ill treated, for they hanged men by the thumbs, or by the head, and smoked them with foul smoke; they put knotted strings about their heads, and twisted them till they bit into the brain. They put them in dungeons with adders and toads, or shut them into close boxes filled with sharp stones, and pressed them there till their bones were broken. Many thousands they killed with hunger and torment, and that lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king. In those days, if three or four men came riding towards a township, all the township fled hastily before them, believing them to be robbers."

[Sidenote: =Treaty of Wallingford.--Death of Stephen.=]

So fared England for many years, till in 1153 a peace was patched up at Wallingford. Matilda had quitted England long before, and her party was now led by her young son, Henry of Anjou, who had come over in 1152 to take her place. Stephen was now old and broken by constant campaigning; he had lately lost his son Eustace, whom he had destined to succeed him; and when it was proposed to him that he should hold the crown for his own life, but make Count Henry his heir, he closed with the offer. Less than a year later he died, leaving England in the worst plight that ever she knew since the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled. For the king's mandate no longer ran over the land, and every baron was ruling for himself. Northumberland and Cumberland were in the hands of the Scots, the Welsh were harrying the border counties, and Yorkshire had been ravaged in 1153 by the last Viking raid recorded in English history. It was time that a strong man should pick up the broken sceptre of William the Conqueror.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] A narrow tippet of white wool, fastened by four black cross-headed pins, such as we see in the shield of arms of the see of Canterbury.

[10] William had made Ralf Bishop of Durham in reward for his evil doing--a typical instance of his cynical disregard for public and private morality.

[11] This lady was a natural daughter of the king, and not his legitimate issue by Queen Matilda.

[12] One of the late king's illegitimate sons, to whom he had given the earldom of Gloucester.

[13] See p. 77.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us