Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/298

Rh 284 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Three stages of Danish Settle ment between Alfred and Guth- rum. Effects of the Danish settle ment. Changed position of Wessex. invasions fall naturally into three periods. There is first a time of mere plunder; secondly, a time of local settlement, when Danish dynasties are set up in certain parts of England; lastly, when England, Denmark, and other European powers had grown into something more of definite shape and order, we find an attempt, and for awhile a suc cessful attempt, to place a king of all Denmark on the throne of a kingdom of all England. Of these periods it is the first two only with which we are concerned at this stage, and these two have their exact parallels in the two stages of English invasion in Britain. The fir.it recorded inroad of the Danes in any part of England is placed m Northumberland in 789 ; but it was not till the latter years of the reign of Ecgberht that their incursions became formidable, at least in southern England. They plundered both in Kent and in Wessex, and they leagued themselves with the West-Welsh to meet a common defeat at the hands of the Bretwalda. The actual settlements did not begin till the reign of vEthelred. In 870 the Danes, after ravaging various parts of Northumberland and Mercia, and setting up a puppet king in Bernicia, occupied East-Anglia, whose king, the famous local saint Eadmund, died a martyr. Then came their first great invasion of Wessex, and the battles of the last days of ^Ethelred and the first days of vElfred. Then (874-888) Northumberland and Mercia came altogether into the power of the Danes. For a moment they overran Wessex. itself, and the realm of yElfred was confined to the isle of Athelney. But the spirit of the great king never failed, and that of his people rose again. The Danes were driven from Wessex, and the peace of Wedmore settled the relations between the West-Saxon king and the Danes of East-Anglia. A line drawn from north-west to south east divided Mercia into two parts. The south western fell to the West-Saxon, the north-eastern to the Dane. The Danish king Guthrum embraced Christianity, and became a precarious and dangerous vassal of the West-Saxon overlord. His actual kingdom lay in East-Anglia ; the chief power in Danish Mercia lay in the confederacy of the five boroughs, Lincoln, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, and Stamford. In all these the Danish settlers seem to have formed a patrician order, holding the English inhabitants in bondage. Deira, with York for its capital, formed a Danish kingdom. In Bernicia English princes still reigned under Danish overlordship. In a large part both of Northumberland and Mercia the land was divided among Danish owners, and not a few places received new Danish names. It might have seemed that the Danish conquest of more than half England was only less thorough than the English conquest of Britain itself. But in truth the Danish occupation of northern and eastern England did but make ready the way for the more thorough incorporation of those lands with the West-Saxon kingdom. Ecgberht had established his supremacy over the English powers in those lands. But it was the supremacy of an external master, The Danish settlements gave the West-Saxon kings a wholly new character. Unless we reckon the tributary kingship of Bernicia, all the ancient English kingdoms, with their royal houses, were swept away wherever the Danes established their power. The West-Saxon kings remained the only champions of Christian faith and English nationality. They were now Kings of the English, and they alone. Mark also that, by the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, while the West-Saxon king lost as an overlord, he gained as an immediate sovereign. The actual West-Saxon dominion, as distinguished from mere West-Saxon supremacy, again reached far beyond the Thames. English Mercia was ruled under ^Elfred by an ealdorman of the old royal stock, the husband of his daughter the renowned ^Ethelflsed. The Lord and Lady of the Mercians held a place intermediate between that of an under-king and an ordinary ealdorman. At the other end of Wessex, Kent and Sussex were completely incorporated, and ceased to be even distinct apanages. The West-Saxon supremacy was more fully established in Wales, and at last, in 893, even the Danes of the north acknowledged it. ^Elfred had thus, in name at least, won back the overlordship of Ecgberht, combined with an enlarged immediate kingdom. As that immediate kingdom took in by far the greater part of Saxon England, and little or nothing that was not Saxon, he sometimes bears, neither the narrower style of King of the West-Saxons nor the wider style of King of the English, but the title, almost peculiar and specially appropriate to himself, of King of the Saxons. His overlordship over the heathen Danes was doubtless far less firmly established than Ecgberht s overlordship had been over their Christian predecessors. But now, in the eyes of the Christian inhabitants of Northumberland and Mercia, the West-Saxon king was no longer a stranger and a conqueror. He had become the champion of their race and faith against their heathen masters. In that character /Elfred himself hardly appeared. The last years of his reign were chiefly taken up in defending Wessex and English Mercia against new Danish inva sions from without. But this Christian and English Secoi championship is the distinct characteristic of the kings adva who follow him, of his son Eadward the Unconquerei y (901-925), of his grandsons /Ethelstan (925-940), Eadraund (940-946), and Eadred (946-955). Under them Wessex grew into England, and the overlordship grew into the empire of Britain. Eadward waged the war in partnership with his sister the Lady of the Mercians, who ruled alone Plat after the death of her husband, and whose territory was on her death fully incorporated with Wessex. The son and the daughter of ^Elfred gradually advanced their frontier, winning battles, fortifying towns, till Eadward, King of the English, held all England south of the H umber as his immediate realm His overlordship was more fully The admitted by the Welsh and the Northumbrians, and it was king. acknowledged for the first time by the Scots and the f Stratbclyde Welsh, who in 924 chose the English king as father and lord. Under ^Ethelstan Northumberland was incorporated, and the immediate realm of the one king of the English reached to the Forth. Still both he and his two successors had to fight against endless revolts and rival kings in Northumberland The Danish land was won and lost and won back over and over again, till at last under Eadred Northumberland was finally incorpo rated, and ruled, sometimes by a single earl, sometimes by two, of the king s appointment. The kingdom of England was now formed The first half of the tenth century thus gave the West- The I Saxon kings a position in Britain such as no English kings i? 6 of any kingdom had held before them. Dominant in c their own island, claiming and, whenever they could, exercising a supremacy over the other princes of the island, their position in the island world of Britain was analogous to the position of the Western emperors in con tinental Europe. It was in fact an imperial position. As such it was marked by the assumption of the imperial titles, monarcfui, tmperator, basileus. Augustus, and even Ccesar. These titles were meant at once to assert the imperial supremacy of the English kings within their own world, and to deny any supremacy over Britain on the part of either of the lords of the continental world. When we remember that some both of the Teutonic and Celtic princes of Britain had been the men of Charles the Great, the denial of all supremacy in the C;esars of the mainland was not needless. Indeed that denial was formally made over