Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/299

Rh THE KINGDOM OP ENGLAND.] ENGLAND 285 and over again at various times down to the reign of Henry VIII. On the other hand, we see during these reigns the beginning of the process which fixed the modern frontier of England to the north. The Picts and the Scots of Britain now forme! what, as regarded their southern neighbours, was a single great kingdom north of Forth and Clyde. In the great fight of Brunanburh in 936 the Scots joined the Danes against ^Ethelstan, and shared in their defeat. After that time the relations of the Scottish kings to the English overlord seem for a long while to have been friendly. During this period the Scottish power began to make its way south of the two great firths. In 945 Eadmund conquered Cumberland. It might not be easy to say exactly what territory is meant by that name ; but it was clearly the whole or a part of the ancient Strathclyde. It most likely took in Carlisle and its district, which had not been under direct English rule since the days of Ecgfrith. This territory Eadmund bestowed on Malcolm king of Scots, distinctly as a territorial fief. This is perhaps the earliest case of a grant of that kind in our history. It is something different from the commendation of either Scots or Britons to Eachvard in 924. The northern kingdom of the Britons now became the ordinary apanage of the heirs of the Scottish crown. The Scottish royal house, if not the actual Scottish kingdom, thus obtained a great establishment south of the firth of Clyde, and soon afterwards the Scottish kings themselves made their way south of the Forth. In the reign of Eadred, Edinburgh, the border fortress of Northumberland to the north, became a Scottish possession. It is not clear on what terms this acquisition was made, or whether it was made in war or in peace. It is at least as likely, under the circumstances of the time, that it was a peaceful grant. But in any case it was the beginning of the process which brought the lands between Forth and Tweed into the possession of the Scottish kings, and which thereby turned them into English kings of a northern England, which was for a while more English than the southern England itself. This period of war and conquest was also a period of legislation and intellectual advancement. In /Elf red we have the noblest name in all English history, the name of him who united more and more varied virtues than any other recorded ruler. The captain of his people, he was also their lawgiver and their teacher. His laws, the first that can be called a code, laws drawn up by himself and then submitted by him to the approval of his Witan, mark, as we have seen, when they are compared with those of Ine, a time when the distinction of Englishman and Briton had passed away from the West-Saxon kingdom. They are remarkable also for the great mass of scriptural and other religious matter which is brought in whole into their text. The laws of Eadward, of ^Ethelstan, and of Eadmund follow, and among them we have the text of the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, the earliest diplomatic in strument in our language. In all these laws we may trace the growth of the various new ideas which have been already spoken of as having gradually made their way into &amp;lt;&amp;lt;wth the older Teutonic system. The king grows greater and greater. Already a sacred, and fast becoming an imperial personage, he is something widely different from the old kings who ruled only over Wight or half of Kent. The increase of his dignity, the increase of the extent of his dominion, raise him at every step above the mass of his people. And as the kingdom grows, the right of the ordinary freeman to a place in the general assembly of the nation becomes more and more shadowy. That assembly shrinks more and more into an assembly of bishops, ealdormen, and king s thegns, made ever and anon more splendid by the appearance of vassal princes and kings. As the king grows in greatness, his immediate followers grow also. The old nobility of the earls is finally sup- Social planted by the new nobility of the thegns. The result of changes. this change is the general depression of the churls as a class, while it becomes easier for this or that churl to raise himself to thegn s rank. On the other hand, the lowest class of all begins to have its lot lightened. The spirit of Christianity, if it does not yet venture to preach the emancipation of the slave, brings in provisions which lessen the rigour of the ancient law. And we now find the first of a series of well meant, though for the most part vain, attempts at least to hinder the slave from being sold out of his native land. Commerce and discovery are fostered. Thegn s rank is held out as a reward to the successful trader by sea. Intercourse with foreign countries becomes closer and closer. No foreign wife shares the throne of the basileu-s of Britain ; but the sisters of glorious yEthelstan are given in marriage to the greatest princes of Western Europe. It was a great age for England, an age of great The West- men and great events. The line of our hero kings, of Saxon Eadward the Unconquered, of ^Ethelstan the Glorious, and kin K s - of Eadmund the Doer-of-great-deeds, is only less famous than it should be, because even their names must yield to the unequalled glory of their grandfather and father. Towards the end of the period we see, for the first time in English history, the person of a great minister, the wise counsellor of wise kings. Our first recorded statesman who was not a king is, as might be looked for in that age, a churchman, the great Dunstan, the guide of England through many stirring years of war and peace. The Church had made the English a nation ; a great churchman was now foremost in making England a kingdom. A kingdom she now became, not yet indivisible, but still one. But one and strong and glorious as England stood in the central years of the tenth century, her unity and strength and glory were bought in no small degree by the loss of the ancient freedom of her people. In literature this was a time which saw nothing short of Begin- the beginning of English prose. For along time, as we ning of have seen, the special home of learning and culture in En S lsl1 England was in the north. Wessex had her scholars too, King Ine s kinsman Ealdhelm at their head ; but the land of Bseda took the lead. In the confusions of the latter years of the eighth century the light of Northumbrian learning seems to have died out ; yet even at the time of yE If red s Writings accession the great king places the greatest lack of learning of south of the Thames. In the interval of peace between -^ fr e &amp;lt;L the wars at the beginning and the wars at the end of his reign, /Elfred largely devoted himself to wipe out this stain. He was himself the first English prose writer on a great scale ; but his writings, in accordance with the modest and practical bent of his mind, were no displays of original genius, but translations, or rather paraphrases, of such Latin works, both on divine and on secular subjects, as he thought were fitted for the improvement of his people. But above anything that Alfred wrote himself stands the really greatest literary work of his reign, the beginning of the English Chronicle as it now stands. The fragmentary The Eng- chronicles of earlier times were put together ; the history of hf h. Bseda and the records of other lands were pressed into the service ; the work became contemporary in the minute and brilliant narrative of Alfred s own reign. From his day it goes on, sometimes full, sometimes meagre, sometimes a dry record of names and dates, sometimes rising to the highest flight of the prose picture or of the heroic lay, but in one shape or another never failing us, till the pen dropped from the hand of the monk of Peterborough who recorded the coming of Henry of Anjou. We, and we alone among the nations of Western Europe, can read our own