Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/170

Ælfred that Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Somerset were the only shires that remained faithful. The king while in Athelney has a vision of Saint Cuthberht, and he afterwards goes into the Danish camp disguised as a harper. In a story preserved in the so-called chronicle of Brompton (, Decem Script. 811) we get the tale of his giving the loaf to the poor man who turned out to be Saint Cuthberht. In a northern version (see, Hist. Eccl. Dun. lib. i. cap. 10, and the History of Saint Cuthbert, , Decem. Script. 71) the few weeks' sojourn at Athelney grows into a three years' sojourn at Glastonbury, a name doubtless better known at Durham. It is possible that some small kernel of truth may be found in these tales, but, as accounts of the events of the year 878, they are altogether fabulous.

By the treaty now made between Ælfred and Guthrum, a frontier, answering in the main to the Watling Street, was drawn between the immediate dominions of the two kings. That is to say, the West-Saxon king kept the whole of his own kingdom and added to it all south-western Mercia, establishing also an overlordship, however nominal, over the land which was yielded to the Danes. By this arrangement, Ælfred, as compared with his predecessors before the Danish invasions, lost as an overlord, but gained as an immediate sovereign. Ecgberht and Æthelwulf had been kings only of the later Wessex and its eastern dependencies, the land south of the Thames, with such supremacy as they might be able to enforce over the other English kingdoms. And this supremacy was undoubtedly more real than any that Ælfred could for some while enforce anywhere beyond his own kingdom. But his own kingdom was greatly enlarged, and that to a considerable extent by lands which had been lost by earlier West-Saxon kings. And this immediate enlargement of the West-Saxon kingdom was not all. Wessex and her king now stood forth as the only English power in Britain, the one which had lived through the Danish inroads and had come out stronger from them. From this time the recovery of the part of England held by the Danes, and the union of the whole into one kingdom, was only a question of time. The English people everywhere now learned to look to the West-Saxon king as their champion and deliverer.

Ælfred did not however at once bring the recovered part of Mercia under his own immediate government. The Mercian kingdom had come to an end by the flight of its king Burhred, Ælfred's brother-in-law, and the Danish occupation of the country. The part of Mercia which Alfred won back he put into the hands of Æthelred, a man of the old kingly house of Mercia, and who held under the West-Saxon king a position more like that of an under-king than of an ordinary ealdorman. To him he gave in marriage his daughter Æthelflæd, the renowned Lady of the Mercians. Æthelred and Æthelflæd proved the most loyal of helpers both to Ælfred and to his successor Eadward.

The question now suggests itself whether it is not in this extension of the West-Saxon kingdom that we are to look for the origin of the legend which makes Ælfred the author of the division of England into shires and hundreds. As far as regards the hundreds, this notion is as old as William of Malmesbury. It is not at all unlikely that Ælfred may have done in his new dominion what his son Eadward clearly did in the much larger territory which he recovered from the Danes. That territory Eadward clearly mapped out into new shires without regard to the boundaries of the older settlements. It may be that Ælfred had already begun the work in his Mercian acquisitions, and that some of the shires in that quarter may be of his formation.

In 879 Guthrum and his Danes left Wessex for Cirencester, where they were in the part of Mercia ceded to Ælfred. The next year they altogether left Ælfred's dominions, and settled in East-Anglia. For a few years there was quiet, but in 884 we have the marked entry in the Chronicles that the hosts in East-Anglia broke the peace. This was seemingly by failing to renew their hostages, and by giving help to a Scandinavian host which, after much ravaging on the continent, landed in Kent and attacked Rochester. Ælfred drove them back to their ships, and then sent a fleet against East Anglia which came in for both a victory and a defeat (see the Chronicles, sub an. 884, 885, and Æthelward as explained by Lappenberg). In 886 Ælfred took an important step for the defence of his kingdom by occupying and fortifying London, which he put into the hands of Æthelred of Mercia (see the collation of the authorities in Parallel Chronicles). This seems to have been accompanied by a general submission to Ælfred of the Angles and Saxons throughout Britain, except so far as they were hindered by Danish masters. This is not very clear, as the only separate English state left was that of Bernicia or aBmburghBamburgh [sic]. Its prince Eadwulf is said in another account (, Decem Script. 1073) to have been on friendly terms with Ælfred, which most likely implies some