Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/297

Rh SUPREMACY OF WESSEX.] ENGLAND 28; .and . g lit. kingdoms of Kent, Sussex, and Essex were now, as the West-Saxon shires had once been, ruled by under-kings cf the West-Saxon house. In Mercia, Northumberland, and East-Anglia native kings btill reigned, bat they held their crowns as the men of the West-Saxon overlord. And in neither was the West-Saxon supremacy a mere precarious dominion, like that of the earlier Bretwaldas. Both rela tions were steps towards more perfect incorporation ; they were stages in the process by which Wessex grew into England. The name of England is not yet found in any con temporary writer. It came into use in the course of the next century. In truth, the oldest name for the Teutonic part of Britain is not England, but Saxony. This is only what was to be looked for. The lands won by the Teutons would first receive a common name from the Celts of the island, and that name, according to their usage, would naturally be Saxony. The Teutonic settlers themselves would not give their country a common name till they had reached some degree of political unity; but when they gave it a name, that name was naturally England. England, in short, as a political unity, began to be formed in the ninth century; it received its name in the tenth. Now that the various English kingdoms are brought so closely together, we begin to feel the need of a geographical name which may take them all in. Some name is needed, some name was doubtless soon felt to be needed, to distinguish the English kingdoms now united under West-Saxon supremacy from the other parts of the island. The position of Ecgberht could not be so well described as by calling him king of the West-Saxons and lord of all England. Lord of all Britain he was not, though he came nearer to being so than any prince before him. West- Wales, if not actually incorporated, was brought into thorough dependence, and the princes of North-W r ales that is, Wales in the modern lense werg brought to acknowledge the West-Saxon supremacy. The Welsh of Strathclyde, the Picts, and the Scots, remained independent and untouched. Thus, though a kingdom of England was riDt yet formed, the greatest of all steps hid been taken towards forming it. But the work of Ecgberht had stood but for a little while when it seemed to be swept away for ever. Yet while it seemed to be swept away, it was in truth both quickened and strengthened by an event which forms one of the great landmarks in our story, an event which has no parallel since the first settlement of the English in Britain. The English conquest was in some sort wrought over again, Christian Britain was again attacked by heathen invaders, and a large part of it was again brought under heathen rule. The West-Saxon supremacy seemed to vanish away ; the West-Saxon kingdom itself was for a moment over come. But the blows which overcame kingdom and supremacy did in truth ouly enable Ecgbcrht s successors again to do Ecgberht s work more thoroughly. The dominion of Ecgberht passed to his son yEthelwulf (837-858), and from him to four of his sons in succession, .Ethelbald, /Ethelberht, .Ethelred (858-871), and the more famous Alfred (871-900). This succession involves a constitutional point ; for we hear of a will of JSthelwulf, confirmed by the Witan, by which the order in which his sons were to succeed to the crown was arranged beforehand. There is in this no formal surrender of the right of the nation to choose its king; for the confirmation by the Witan was equivalent to a conditional election in advance. But that the crown could be made the subject of bequest in any shape shows the growth of a whole crowd of ideas which had no place in the elder Teutonic system. We are, to say the least, on the way towards the doctrine that the leader ship of men is not an office but a property. This is the first case of any attempt to settle the succession beforehand, and, as in most other cases afterwards, the attempt failed. The sous of jEthelwulf succeeded; bat they did not succeed in the order marked out by their father s will. Another point which marks the increasing intercourse between England and the mainland is the fact that yEthelwulf made the pilgrimage to Rome. More than one king had given up his crown, and had ended his days at Rome ; but this is the first case of a reigning king thus absenting him self from his kingdom. On his return also he married a foreign wife, Judith the daughter of Charles the Bald. This is the first recorded case of the kind since the marriage of ^-Ethelberht of Kent ; and we shall find only one more in the whole line before the Norman Conquest. As long as England remained purely England, the mothers of English kings were Englishwomen. Another point with regard to the succession should be Acces noticed. On the death of ^Ethelred, ^Elfred succeeded, sion of though yEthelred had children living. This is of course simply an instance of the general law of choosing from the royal house, but of choosing ouly one who was personally qualified to reign. Minors were therefore passed by, as a matter of course, in favour of a full grown uncle or other kinsman. The children thus shut out might or might not be chosen at some future vacancy. The right of Alfred to his crown was not disputed in his own day, nor has he commonly been branded by later historians with the name of usurper. But it is well to bear in mind that hia succession was of exactly the same kind as that of some later kings to whom the name of usurper has been freely applied. In all such cases the mistake comes from for getting that the strict laws of succession to which we have been used for the last two or three centuries were altogether unknown in the earlier stages of our constitution. But the main history of England during these reigns, and indeed for a long time after, gathers round the succes sive Danish invasions. Christian England was now attacked by the heathen Danes, as Christian Britain had been attacked by the heathen English. But the results in the two cases were widely different. The Danes were not a people altogether foreign to the English ; they were of kindred race, and spoke a kindred tongue. Had their in roads begun when the settlements of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were still new, they ni ght have passed for a fourth branch of the same stock, come to share the spoil with their kinsfolk. As it was, their nearness in blood and speech made them disposed to accept a new religion at the hands of the English, and in the end to merge their own national being in that of the English, in a way in which the English themselves had been in no way disposed to do towards the wholly foreign races among whom they settled. The Danish invasions of England were part of a general movement which about this time began to carry the adven turous people of Scandinavia into all parts of Europe. Of the three great kingdoms into which they settled down about this time, Sweden had little to do with Western Europe ; the advance of that power was to the east. But the people of Norway and Denmark ravaged everywhere, and settled in many places, along the coasts of Germany, Gaul, and the British islands. The Northmen founded powerful states, which have an occasional connexion with English history, in Ireland, Orkney, and the Western Inlands ; but the Scandinavian settlements in England itself were almost wholly Danish in the stricter sense. 1 Their 1 That there were in northern England Northmen, as distinguished from Danes, appears from the record of the commendation of 924 in the Winchester Chronicle. The name Northmen, at an earlier time, meant the Scandinavian nations generally ; it is now specially used to mean the men of Norway. The Danes settled on the eastern coast of Northumberland and East-Anglia; the Northmen would seem tc have made their way into western Yorkshire by way of Curcberland, The Pan- ish inva sions. Move ments of the Scan dinavian nations.