dence by the formation in 787 of an archbishopric of Lichfield as a check to the See of Canterbury in the south, and a rival to the See of York in the north.

But while Offa was hampered in his projects by the dread of the West-Saxons at home, he was forced to watch jealously a power which had risen to dangerous greatness over sea, the power of the Franks. Till now, the interests of the English people had lain wholly within the bounds of the Britain they had won. But at this moment our national horizon suddenly widened, and the fortunes of England became linked to the general fortunes of Western Christendom. It was by the work of English missionaries that Britain was first drawn into political relations with the Frankish court. The Northumbrian Willibrord, and the more famous West-Saxon Boniface or Winfrith, followed in the track of earlier preachers, both Irish and English, who had been laboring among the heathen of Germany, and especially among those who had now become subject to the Franks. The Frank king Pippin's connection with the English preachers led to constant intercourse with England; a Northumbrian scholar, Alcuin, was the centre of the literary revival at his court. Pippin's son Charles, known in after days as Charles the Great, maintained the same interest in English affairs. His friendship with Alcuin drew him into. close relations with Northern Britain. Ecgberht, the claimant of the West-Saxon throne, had found a refuge with him since Offa's league with Beorhtric in 787. With Offa, too, his relations seem to have been generally friendly.

But the Mercian king shrank cautiously from any connection which might imply a recognition of Frankish supremacy. He had indeed good grounds for caution. The costly gifts sent by Charles to the monasteries of England as of Ireland showed his will to obtain an influence in both countries; he maintained relations with Northumbria, with Kent, with the whole English Church. Above all, he harbored at his court exiles from every English realm, -exiled kings from Northumbria, East Anglian thegns, fugitives from Mercia itself; and Ecgberht probably marched in his train when the shouts of the people and priesthood of Rome hailed him as Roman Emperor. When the death of Beorhtric in 802 opened a way for the exile's return to Wessex, the relations of Charles with the English were still guided by the dream that Britain, lost to the Empire at the hour when the rest of the western provinces were lost, should return to the Empire now that Rome had risen again to more than its old greatness

in the west; and the revolutions which were distracting the English kingdoms told steadily in his favor.

The years since Ecgberht's flight had made little change in the state of Britain. Offa's completion of his kingdom by the seizure of East Anglia had been followed by his death in 796; and under his successor, Cenwulf, the Mercian archbishopric was suppressed, and there was no attempt to carry further the supremacy of the Midland kingdom. Cenwulf stood silently by when Ecgberht mounted the West-Saxon throne, and maintained peace with the new ruler of Wessex throughout his reign. The first enterprise of Ecgberht, indeed, was not directed against his English but his Welsh neighbors. In 815 he marched into the heart of Cornwall, and after eight years of fighting, the last fragment of British dominion in the west came to an end. As a nation, Britain had passed away with the victories of Deorham and Chester; of the separate British peoples who had still carried on the struggle with the three English kingdoms, the Britons of Cumbria and of Strathclyde had already bowed to Northumbrian rule; the Britons of Wales had owned by tribute to Offa the supremacy of Mercia; the last unconquered British state of West Wales as far as the Land's End now passed under the mastery of Wessex.

While Wessex was regaining the strength it had so long lost, its rival in Mid-Britain was sinking into helpless anarchy. Within, Mercia was torn by a civil war which broke out on Cenwulf's death in 821; and the weakness which this left behind was seen when the old strife with Wessex was renewed by his successor Beornwulf, who in 825 penetrated into Wiltshire, and was defeated in a bloody battle at Ellandun. All England south of the Thames at once submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex, and East Anglia rose in a desperate revolt which proved fatal to its Mercian rulers. Two of its kings in succession fell fighting on East Anglian soil; and a third, Wiglaf, had hardly mounted the Mercian throne when his exhausted kingdom was again called on to encounter the West-Saxon. Ecgberht saw that the hour had come for a decisive onset. In 828 his army marched northward without a struggle; Wiglaf fled helplessly before it; and Mercia bowed to the West-Saxon overlordship. From Mercia Ecgberht marched on Northumbria; but half a century of anarchy had robbed that kingdom of all vigor, and pirates were already harrying its coast; its nobles met him at Dore in Derbyshire, and owned him as their overlord. The work that Oswiu and Æthelbald had failed to do was done, and the whole English

race in Britain was for the first time knit together under a single ruler. Long and bitter as the struggle for independence was still to be in Mercia and in the north, yet from the moment that Northumbria bowed to its West-Saxon overlord, England was made in fact if not as yet in name

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Hunt, A History of the English Church, 597-1066. Mason (editor), The Mission of St. Augustine. Cutts, Augustine of Canterbury. Ramsay, Foundations of England, Vol. I, chaps. xi and xii. Hodgkin, A Political History of England to 1066, chaps. vii, xi, and xii. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chap. viii, especially for the organization of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Gneist, History of the English Constitution, chap. v.

CHAPTER IV

ALFRED THE GREAT AND ENGLISH LEARNING

THE triumph of the West-Saxons under Egbert marked the overlordship of a new line of kings, rather than the establishment of national unity. The work of breaking down the strong forces of independence which yet remained among the conquered states and of welding the tribal groups into an English people would have required many generations even if England could have had peace. But England was not to have peace. Even before Egbert's day, heathen Northmen from Norway and Denmark began to plunder the coasts of Europe and Britain. Before long, these piratical expeditions were transformed into systematic invasions, and in a long contest with the bold Northmen, Alfred the Great was forced to relinquish a large portion of his realm. Undaunted by his severe trials on the battlefield, however, Alfred devoted himself with great energy to the development of the arts of civilization in the dominions that remained to him. It is for this work, as well as for his heroic defence of national existence, that Alfred won an imperishable fame in English history.

§ 1. Danish Havoc in England1

The ruin that the Danes had wrought had been no mere material ruin. When they first appeared off her shores, England stood in the forefront of European culture; her scholars, her libraries, her poetry, had no rivals in the Western world. But all, or nearly all, of this culture had disappeared. The art and learning of Northumbria had been destroyed at a blow; and throughout the rest of the Danelaw the ruin was as complete. The very Christianity of Mid-Britain was shaken; the sees of Dunwich and Lindsey came to an end; at Lichfield and Elmham

1 Green, Conquest of England, pp. 148 ff. By permission of Mrs. John Richard Green and Harper & Brothers, Publishers.

the succession of bishops became broken and irregular; even London hardly kept its bishop's stool. But its letters and civilization were more than shaken-they had vanished in the sack of the great abbeys of the Fen.

Even in Wessex, which ranked as the least advanced of the English kingdoms, Ælfred could recall that he saw, as a child, "how the churches stood filled with treasures and books, and there was also a great multitude of God's servants;" but this was "before it had all been ravaged and burned." "So clean was learning decayed among English folk," says the king, "that very few were there on this side Humber that could understand their rituals in English, or translate aught out of Latin into English, and I ween there were not many beyond the Humber. So few of them were there that I cannot bethink me of a single one south of Thames when I came to the kingdom." It was, in fact, only in the fragment of Mercia which had been saved from the invaders that a gleam of the old intellectual light lingered in the school which Bishop Werfrith had gathered round him at Worcester.

It is in his efforts to repair this intellectual ruin that we see Ælfred's conception of the work he had to do. The Danes had, no doubt, brought with them much that was to enrich the temper of the coming England, a larger and freer manhood, a greater daring, a more passionate love of personal freedom, better seamanship and a warmer love of the sea, a keener spirit of traffic, and a range of trade-ventures which dragged English commerce into a wider world. But their work of destruction threatened to rob England of things even more precious than these. In saving Wessex, Ælfred had saved the last refuge of all that we sum up in the word "civilization," of that sense of a common citizenship and nationality, of the worth of justice and order and good government, of the harmony of individual freedom in its highest form with the general security of society, of the need for a coöperation of every moral and intellectual force in the development both of the individual man and of the people as a whole, which England had for two centuries been either winning from its own experiences or learning from the tradition of the past.

2. Elfred Seeks Learned Men

It was because literature embodied what was worthiest in this civilization that Ælfred turned to the restoration of letters. He sought in Mercia for the learning that Wessex had lost. He made