For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities
are scant and imperfect. The only extant British account
is the “Epistola” of Gildas, a work written probably about
A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and inflated, but
his book is of great value in the light it throws on the state
of the island at that time, and above all as the one record
of the conquest which we have from the side of the conquered.
The English conquerors, on the other hand, have
left jottings of their conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex
in the curious annals which form the opening of the
compilation now known as the “English” or “Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle,” annals which are undoubtedly historic, though
with a slight mythical intermixture. For the history of
the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast
we possess no written materials from either side; and a
fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the
later compilation (“Historia Britonum”) which bears the
name of Nennius alone throws light on the conquest of the
North.

From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has
succeeded by a wonderful combination of historical and
archæological knowledge in constructing a narrative of the
conquest of Southern and South-Western Britain which
must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.

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This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of
the account given in my text; and I can only trust that it may
soon be embodied in some more accessible form than that of
a series of papers in the Transactions of the Archæological
Institute. In a like way, though Kemble’s “Saxons in
England” and Sir F. Palgrave’s “History of the English
Commonwealth” (if read with caution) contain much that
is worth notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution
of the English people and the changes introduced into it
since their settlement in Britain must be mainly drawn from
the “Constitutional History” of Professor Stubbs.

Bæda’s “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum,” a work
of which I have spoken in my text, is the primary authority
for the history of the Northumbrian overlordship which
followed the Conquest. It is by copious insertions from
Bæda that the meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the
West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which
they at present appear in the part of the English Chronicle
which concerns this period. The life of Wilfrid by Eddi,
with those of Cuthbert by an anonymous contemporary and
by Bæda himself, throws great light on the religious and
intellectual condition of the North at the time of its
supremacy. But with the fall of Northumbria we pass into
a period of historical dearth. A few incidents of Mercian
history are preserved among the meagre annals of Wessex in
the English Chronicle: but for the most part we are thrown
upon later writers, especially Henry of Huntingdon and
William of Malmesbury, who, though authors of the twelfth
century, had access to older materials which are now lost.
A little may be gleaned from biographies such as that of
Guthlac of Crowland; but the letters of Boniface and
Alcwine, which have been edited by Jaffé in his series of
“Monumenta Germanica,” form the most valuable contemporary
materials for this period.

From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the
English Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we
have said, is a compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of
the Conquest of South Britain, and (2) Short Notices of the
Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded by copious insertions

1-005]

from Bæda, and after the end of his work by brief additions
from some northern sources. These materials may have
been thrown together into their present form in Ælfred’s
time as a preface to the far fuller annals which begin with
the reign of Æthelwulf, and which widen into a great
contemporary history when they reach that of Ælfred himself.
After Ælfred’s day the Chronicle varies much in value.
Through the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a
Mercian Chronicle is imbedded in it: it then dies down into
a series of scant and jejune entries, broken however with
grand battle-songs, till the reign of Æthelred when its
fulness returns.

Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable
mass of historical material for the age of Ælfred and his
successors. The life of Ælfred which bears the name of
Asser, puzzling as it is in some ways, is probably really
Asser’s work, and certainly of contemporary authority. The
Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears the
name of Æthelweard adds a little to our acquaintance with
this time. The Laws, which form the base of our constitutional
knowledge of this period, fall, as has been well
pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the
earlier laws of Æthelberht and Ine, “mainly of the nature
of amendments of custom.” Those of Ælfred, Æthelred,
Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the
Confessor, “aspire to the character of Codes.” They are
printed in Mr. Thorpe’s “Ancient Laws and Institutes
of England,” but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs
in his “Select Charters” contain all that directly bears
on our constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters
and other documents belonging to this period has been
collected by Kemble in his “Codex Diplomaticus Ævi
Saxonici,” and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in his
“Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum.” Dunstan’s biographies have
been collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series
published by the Master of the Rolls.

In the period which follows the accession of Æthelred
we are still aided by these collections of royal Laws and

1-006]

Charters, and the English Chronicle becomes of great
importance. Its various copies indeed differ so much in tone
and information from one another that they may to some
extent be looked upon as distinct works, and “Florence of
Worcester” is probably the translation of a valuable copy
of the “Chronicle” which has disappeared. The translation
however was made in the twelfth century, and it is coloured
by the revival of national feeling which was characteristic
of the time. Of Eadward the Confessor himself we have
a contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard for the
Master of the Rolls) which throws great light on the personal
history of the King and on his relations to the house
of Godwine.

The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of
St. Quentin, a verbose and confused writer, whose work
was abridged and continued by William of Jumièges, a
contemporary of the Conqueror. William’s work in turn
served as the basis of the “Roman de Rou” composed by
Wace in the time of Henry the Second. The primary
authority for the Conqueror himself is the “Gesta Willelmi”
of his chaplain and violent partizan, William of Poitiers.
For the period of the invasion, in which the English authorities
are meagre, we have besides these the contemporary
“Carmen de Bello Hastingensi,” by Guy, Bishop of Amiens,
and the pictures in the Bayeux Tapestry. Orderic, a writer
of the twelfth century, gossipy and confused but honest
and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement
in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in
his account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among
secondary authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of
Durham is useful for northern matters, and William of
Malmesbury worthy of note for his remarkable combination
of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of
course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief
documents for the early history of Anjou have been collected
in the “Chroniques d’Anjou” published by the Historical
Society of France. Those which are authentic are little
more than a few scant annals of religious houses; but light
is thrown on them by the contemporary French chronicles.

1-007]

The “Gesta Consulum” is nothing but a compilation of the
twelfth century, in which a mass of Angevin romance as
to the early story of the Counts is dressed into historical
shape by copious quotations from these French historians.

It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our
earlier history when historical criticism has done more than
has yet been done for the materials given us by Ireland and
Wales. For Welsh history the “Brut y Tywysogion” and
the “Annales Cambriæ” are now accessible in the series
published by the Master of the Rolls; the “Chronicle of
Caradoc of Lancarvan” is translated by Powel; the Mabinogion,
or Romantic Tales, have been published by Lady
Charlotte Guest; and the Welsh Laws collected by the
Record Commission. The importance of these, as embodying
a customary code of very early date, will probably be
better appreciated when we possess the whole of the Brehon
Laws, the customary laws of Ireland, which are now being
issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to which attention
has justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine (“Early History
of Institutions”) as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest
antiquity.

The enormous mass of materials which exists for the
early history of Ireland, various as they are in critical
value, may be seen in Mr. O’Curry’s “Lectures on the
Materials of Ancient Irish History”; and they may be
conveniently studied by the general reader in the “Annals
of the Four Masters,” edited by Dr. O’Donovan. But this
is a mere compilation (though generally a faithful one)
made about the middle of the seventeenth century from
earlier sources, two of which have been published in the
Rolls series. One, the “Wars of the Gaedhil with the
Gaill,” is an account of the Danish wars which may have
been written in the eleventh century; the other, the
“Annals of Loch Cé,” is a chronicle of Irish affairs from
the end of the Danish wars to 1590. The “Chronicon
Scotorum” (in the same series) extends to the year 1150,
and though composed in the seventeenth century is valuable
from the learning of its author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The
works of Colgan are to Irish church affairs what the “Annals

1-008]

of the Four Masters” are to Irish civil history. They
contain a vast collection of translations and transcriptions
of early saints’ lives, from those of Patrick downwards.
Adamnan’s “Life of Columba” (admirably edited by Dr.
Beeves) supplies some details to the story of the
Northumbrian kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we
find the “Book of Rights,” a summary of the dues and
rights of the several over-kings and under-kings, of much
earlier date probably than the Norman invasion; and
Cormac’s “Glossary,” attributed to the tenth century and
certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned
of legal and social details, and something of the pagan
religion of Ireland.

Old England

For the fatherland of the English race we must
look far away from England itself. In the fifth
century after the birth of Christ the one country
which we know to have borne the name of Angeln
or the Engleland lay within the district which is
now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the
peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern
seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered
homesteads, its prim little townships looking down
on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast
with a sunless woodland broken here and there by
meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem
to have been merely an outlying fragment of what
was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk of
whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover

1-010]

and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons
of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to
the Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons
stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the
fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay
another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is
still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle,
Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family; and at
the moment when history discovers them they
were being drawn together by the ties of a common
blood, common speech, common social and political
institutions. There is little ground indeed for
believing that the three tribes looked on themselves
as one people, or that we can as yet apply
to them, save by anticipation, the common name
of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to
share in the conquest of the land in which we
live; and it is from the union of all of them when
its conquest was complete that the English people
has sprung.

The English Village

Of the temper and life of the folk in this older
England we know little. But from the glimpses
that we catch of it when conquest had brought
them to the shores of Britain their political and
social organization must have been that of the
German race to which they belonged. In their
villages lay ready formed the social and political
life which is round us in the England of to-day.
A belt of forest or waste parted each from its

1-011]

fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark
the “township,” as the village was then called
from the “tun” or rough fence and trench that
served as its simple fortification, formed a complete
and independent body, though linked by ties
which were strengthening every day to the townships
about it and the tribe of which it formed a
part. Its social centre was the homestead where
the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the first
English settlers in the waste, still handed down
the blood and traditions of his fathers. Around
this homestead or æthel, each in its little croft,
stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls,
men sprung, it may be, from descendants of the
earliest settler who had in various ways forfeited
their claim to a share in the original homestead,
or more probably from incomers into the village
who had since settled round it and been admitted
to a share in the land and freedom of the
community. The eorl was distinguished from his
fellow villagers by his wealth and his nobler
blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
reverence; and it was from him and his fellow
æthelings that host-leaders, whether of the village
or the tribe, were chosen in times of war. But
this claim to precedence rested simply on the free
recognition of his fellow villagers. Within the
township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It
was the freeman who was the base of village
society. He was the “free-necked man” whose

1-012]

long hair floated over a neck which had never
bowed to a lord. He was the “weaponed man”
who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone
preserved that right of self-redress or private war
which in such a state of society formed the main
check upon lawless outrage.

Justice

Among the English, as among all the races of
mankind, justice had originally sprung from each
man’s personal action. There had been a time
when every freeman was his own avenger. But
even in the earliest forms of English society of
which we find traces this right of self-defence was
being modified and restricted by a growing sense
of public justice. The “blood-wite” or compensation
in money for personal wrong was the first
effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private
revenge. The freeman’s life and the freeman’s
limb had each on this system its legal price.
“Eye for eye,” ran the rough code, and “life for
life,” or for each fair damages. We see a further
step towards the modern recognition of a wrong as
done not to the individual man but to the people
at large in another custom of early date. The
price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer
to the man he wronged, but by the family or
house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of
the wronged. Order and law were thus made to
rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond
which knit its families together; every outrage
was held to have been done by all who were

1-013]

linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to
have been done against all who were linked in
blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense
of the value of the family bond as a means of
restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the
tribe as a whole did not as yet possess sprang the
first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman
was his kinsman’s keeper, bound to protect him
from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and
to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were
done. So fully was this principle recognized that
even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen
with crime his kinsfolk still remained
in fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn
oath of his innocence or his guilt that he had to
stand or fall.

The Land

As the blood-bond gave its first form to English
justice, so it gave their first forms to English
society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings
of honour and discipline which held the host
together were drawn from the common duty of
every man in each little group of warriors to his
house. And as they fought side by side on the
field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil.
Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing;
and each “wick” or “ham” or “stead” or “tun”
took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
together in it. In this way the home or “ham”
of the Billings was Billingham, and the “tun” or

1-014]

township of the Harlings was Harlington. But in
such settlements the tie of blood was widened into
the larger tie of land. Land with the German
race seems at a very early time to have become
everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom.
The freeman was strictly the free-holder, and the
exercise of his full rights as a free member of the
community to which he belonged became inseparable
from the possession of his “holding” in it.
But property had not as yet reached that stage of
absolutely personal possession which the social
philosophy of a later time falsely regarded as its
earliest state. The woodland and pasture-land of
an English village were still undivided, and every
free villager had the right of turning into it his
cattle or swine. The meadow-land lay in like
manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
spring. It was only when grass began to grow
afresh that the common meadow was fenced off
into grass-fields, one for each household in the
village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and
division were at an end again. The plough-land
alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of
the freemen, though even the plough-land was;
subject to fresh division as the number of claimants
grew greater or less.

Læt and Slave

It was this sharing in the common land which
marked off the freeman or ceorl from the unfree
man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.

1-015]

As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who,
whether from their earlier arrival or from kinship
with the original settlers of the village, had been
admitted to a share in its land and its corporate
life, so the læt was a descendant of later comers to
whom such a share was denied, or in some cases
perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern
sense of freedom the læt was free enough. He
had house and home of his own, his life and limb
were as secure as the ceorl’s–save as against his
lord; it is probable from what we see in later
laws that as time went on he was recognized
as a member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot,
allowed equal right at law, and called like
the full free man to the hosting. But he was
unfree as regards lord and land. He had neither
part nor lot in the common land of the village.
The ground which he tilled he held of some
freeman of the tribe to whom he paid rent
in labour or in kind. And this man was his
lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might
gain in the general social life of his fellow
villagers, he had no rights as against his lord.
He could leave neither land nor lord at his will.
He was bound to render due service to his lord in
tillage or in fight. So long however as these services
were done the land was his own. His lord could not
take it from him; and he was bound to give him
aid and protection in exchange for his services.

1-016]

Far different from the position of the læt was
that of the slave, though there is no ground for
believing that the slave class was other than a
small one. It was a class which sprang mainly
from debt or crime. Famine drove men to “bend
their heads in the evil days for meat”; the debtor,
unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground
his freeman’s sword and spear, took up the
labourer’s mattock, and placed his head as a slave
within a master’s hands. The criminal whose
kinsfolk would not make up his fine became a
crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes
a father pressed by need sold children and wife
into bondage. In any case the slave became part
of the live stock of his master’s estate, to be willed
away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree
was kept as carefully as his own. His children
were bondsmen like himself; even a freeman’s
children by a slave mother inherited the mother’s
taint. “Mine is the calf that is born of my cow,”
ran an English proverb. Slave cabins clustered
round the homestead of every rich landowner;
ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd
and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hayward
and woodward, were often slaves. It was not
indeed slavery such as we have known in modern
times, for stripes and bonds were rare: if the slave
was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash.
But his master could slay him if he would; it was
but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in

1-017]

the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance
or guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him,
his lord claimed the damages; if guilty of wrong-doing,
“his skin paid for him” under his master’s
lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed
beast, and when caught he might be flogged to
death. If the wrong-doer were a woman-slave she
might be burned.

The Moot

With the public life of the village however the
slave had nothing, the last in early days little, to
do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
villagers for justice and government, a slave had
no place or voice, while the last was originally
represented by the lord whose land he tilled. The
life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely
in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay
round the moot-hill or the sacred tree where the
community met from time to time to deal out its
own justice and to make its own laws. Here new
settlers were admitted to the freedom of the
township, and bye-laws framed and headman and
tithing-man chosen for its governance. Here
plough-land and meadow-land were shared in due
lot among the villagers, and field and homestead
passed from man to man by the delivery of a turf
cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer with
farmer was settled according to the “customs” of
the township as its elder men stated them, and
four men were chosen to follow headman or
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a

1-018]

reverence such as is stirred by the sight of the
head-waters of some mighty river that one looks
back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick.
It was here that England learned to be a “mother
of Parliaments.” It was in these tiny knots of
farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were
to spring learned the worth of public opinion, of
public discussion, the worth of the agreement, the
“common sense,” the general conviction to which
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their
force from being expressions of that general
conviction. A humourist of our own day has laughed
at Parliaments as “talking shops,” and the laugh
has been echoed by some who have taken humour
for argument. But talk is persuasion, and persuasion
is force, the one force which can sway
freemen to deeds such as those which have made
England what she is. The “talk” of the village
moot, the strife and judgement of men giving
freely their own rede and setting it as freely aside
for what they learn to be the wiser rede of other
men, is the groundwork of English history.

The Folk

Small therefore as it might be, the township or
village was thus the primary and perfect type of
English life, domestic, social, and political. All
that England has been since lay there. But
changes of which we know nothing had long before
the time at which our history opens grouped these
little commonwealths together in larger communities,
whether we name them Tribe, People, or

1-019]

Folk. The ties of race and kindred were no doubt
drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization
of each Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood
mainly from war, from a common greed of conquest,
a common need of defence. Its form at any rate
was wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact
the war-host, the gathering of every freeman of
the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head
who existed only so long as war went on, was the
leader whom the host chose to command it. Its
Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the
host’s council of war, the gathering of those
ealdormen who had brought the men of their
villages to the field. The host was formed by
levies from the various districts of the tribe; the
larger of which probably owed their name of
“hundreds” to the hundred warriors which each
originally sent to it. In historic times however
the regularity of such a military organization, if it
ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas
varied with the varying customs of each district.
But men, whether many or few, were still due
from each district to the host, and a cry of war at
once called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with
their followers to the field.

The military organization of the tribe thus
gave from the first its form to the civil organization.
But the peculiar shape which its civil
organization assumed was determined by a
principle familiar to the Germanic races and

1-020]

destined to exercise a vast influence on the future
of mankind. This was the principle of representation.
The four or ten villagers who followed
the reeve of each township to the general muster
of the hundred were held to represent the whole
body of the township from whence they came.
Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing,
their pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a
moot which was made by this gathering of the
representatives of the townships that lay within
its bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal
from the moots of each separate village as well as
of arbitration in dispute between township and
township. The judgement of graver crimes and of
life or death fell to its share; while it necessarily
possessed the same right of law-making for the
hundred that the village-moot possessed for each
separate village. And as hundred-moot stood
above town-moot, so above the hundred-moot
stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the
people in arms, at once war-host and highest law-court
and general Parliament of the tribe. But
whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the
principle of representation was preserved. In
both the constitutional forms, the forms of
deliberation and decision, were the same. In each
the priests proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of
higher blood spoke, groups of freemen from each
township stood round, shaking their spears in
assent, clashing shields in applause, settling

1-021]

matters in the end by loud shouts of “Aye” or
“Nay.”

Social Life

Of the social or the industrial life of our
fathers in this older England we know less than
of their political life. But there is no ground for
believing them to have been very different in
these respects from the other German peoples
who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world.
Though their border nowhere touched the border
of the Empire they were far from being utterly
strange to its civilization. Roman commerce
indeed reached the shores of the Baltic, and we
have abundant evidence that the arts and refinement
of Rome were brought into contact with
these earlier Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts,
and shield-bosses which have been found in
Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than
the close of the third century, are clearly either
of Roman make or closely modelled on Roman
metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in
Sleswick peat-mosses afford a yet more
conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the
Empire. But apart from these outer influences
the men of the three tribes were far from
being mere savages. They were fierce warriors,
but they were also busy fishers and tillers of the
soil, as proud of their skill in handling plough
and mattock or steering the rude boat with which
they hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in
handling sword and spear. They were hard

1-022]

drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and
the “ale-feast” was the centre of their social life.
But coarse as the revel might seem to modern
eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which
rose in the midst of their villages was often
Homeric in its simplicity and dignity. Queen or
Eorl’s wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl
or mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle
of King or Ealdorman in the midst to the mead
benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman
sang the hero-songs of his race. Dress and
arms showed traces of a love of art and beauty,
none the less real that it was rude and incomplete.
Rings, amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved
in their workmanship the deftness of the goldsmith’s
art. Cloaks were often fastened with
golden buckles of curious and exquisite form, set
sometimes with rough jewels and inlaid with
enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior’s
helmet, the intricate adornment of the warrior’s
shield, tell like the honour in which the smith
was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
twisted glass goblets, so common in the
early graves of Kent, are shewn by their form to
be of English workmanship. It is only in the
English pottery, hand-made, and marked with
coarse zigzag patterns, that we find traces of
utter rudeness.

Religion

The religion of these men was the same as
that of the rest of the German peoples. Christianity

1-023]

had by this time brought about the
conversion of the Roman Empire, but it had not
penetrated as yet among the forests of the north.
The common God of the English people was
Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways and
boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
the invention of letters, and whom every tribe
held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Our
own names for the days of the week still recall to
us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their
German homeland. Wednesday is Woden’s-day,
as Thursday is the day of Thunder, the god of
air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea’s-day, the
deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose
emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought
increase to every field and stall they visited.
Saturday may commemorate an obscure god Sætere;
Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was
death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the
spring, lends her name to the Christian festival of
the Resurrection. Behind these floated the dim
shapes of an older mythology; “Wyrd,” the
death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in
the “Weird” of northern superstition; or the
Shield-maidens, the “mighty women” who, an
old rime tells us, “wrought on the battle-field
their toil and hurled the thrilling javelins.”
Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood
and fell, or hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor,
the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and

1-024]

“Old Nick”; Weland, the forger of weighty
shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later
home in the “Weyland’s smithy” of Berkshire;
Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with
that of Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of
this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a priesthood;
and though a priestly class existed it seems
at no time to have had much weight among
Englishmen. As each freeman was his own judge
and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest;
and English worship lay commonly in the
sacrifice which the house-father offered to the
gods of his hearth.

The English Temper

It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the
worship of the older gods of flood and fell that
we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of
English poems, is as we have it now a poem of
the eighth century, the work it may be of some
English missionary of the days of Bæda and
Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of
his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the
thin veil of Christianity which he has flung over
it fades away as we follow the hero-legend of our
fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
their conception of life breathes through every
line. Life was built with them not on the hope
of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
of noble souls. “I have this folk ruled these
fifty winters,” sings the hero-king as he sits death-smitten

1-025]

beside the dragon’s mound. “Lives there
no folk-king of kings about me–not any one of
them–dare in the war-strife welcome my onset!
Time’s change and chances I have abided, held my
own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never
sware I falsely against right. So for all this may
I glad be at heart now, sick though I sit here,
wounded with death-wounds!” In men of such
a temper, strong with the strength of manhood
and full of the vigour and the love of life, the
sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all
woke chords of a pathetic poetry. “Soon will it
be,” ran the warning rime, “that sickness or
sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the
fire ring thee, or the flood whelm thee, or the
sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age o’ertake
thee, and thine eye’s brightness sink down in
darkness.” Strong as he might be, man struggled
in vain with the doom that encompassed him, that
girded his life with a thousand perils and broke
it at so short a span. “To us,” cries Beowulf in
his last fight, “to us it shall be as our Weird
betides, that Weird that is every man’s lord!”
But the sadness with which these Englishmen
fronted the mysteries of life and death had
nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids
men eat and drink for to-morrow they die. Death
leaves man man and master of his fate. The
thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger
than the thought of doom. “Well shall a man

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do when in the strife he minds but of winning
longsome renown, nor for his life cares!” “Death
is better than life of shame!” cries Beowulf’s
sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife
with the fiend, “go the weird as it will.” If life
is short, the more cause to work bravely till it
is over. “Each man of us shall abide the end
of his life-work; let him that may work, work his
doomed deeds ere death come!”

English Piracy

The energy of these peoples found vent in a
restlessness which drove them to take part in
the general attack of the German race on the
Empire of Rome. For busy tillers and busy
fishers as Englishmen were, they were at heart
fighters; and their world was a world of war.
Tribe warred with tribe, and village with village;
even within the village itself feuds parted
household from household, and passions of hatred
and vengeance were handed on from father to
son. Their mood was above all a mood of fighting
men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a
dash of hardness and cruelty in it, but ennobled
by the virtues which spring from war, by personal
courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high
and stern sense of manhood and the worth of
man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
a characteristic of the race. War was the
Englishman’s “shield-play” and “sword-game”; the
gleeman’s verse took fresh fire as he sang of the
rush of the host and the crash of its shield-line.

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Their arms and weapons, helmet and mailshirt,
tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
broad dagger that hung at each warrior’s girdle,
gathered to them much of the legend and the
art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a
living thing. And next to their love of war
came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
Beowulf’s song, as everywhere throughout
the life that it pictures, we catch the salt whiff
of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he
plunged into the sea to meet walrus and sea-lion;
he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy waters
of the north. Hardly less than his love for the
sea was the love he bore to the ship that traversed
it. In the fond playfulness of English verse the
ship was “the wave-floater,” “the foam-necked,”
“like a bird” as it skimmed the wave-crest, “like
a swan” as its curved prow breasted the “swan-road”
of the sea.

Their passion for the sea marked out for them
their part in the general movement of the German
nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
advancing over mountain and plain the boats of
the Englishmen pushed faster over the sea. Bands
of English rovers, outdriven by stress of fight,
had long found a home there, and lived as they
could by sack of vessel or coast. Chance has
preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one of the

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war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is
flat-bottomed, seventy feet long and eight or nine feet
wide, its sides of oak boards fastened with bark
ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
waves with a freight of warriors whose arms,
axes, swords, lances, and knives, were found
heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of
the Middle Ages such boats could only creep
cautiously along from harbour to harbour in
rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness
fitted them admirably for the piracy by which
the men of these tribes were already making
themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled
them to beach the vessel on any fitting coast;
and a step on shore at once transformed the boatmen
into a war-band. From the first the daring
of the English race broke out in the secrecy and
suddenness of the pirates’ swoop, in the fierceness
of their onset, in the careless glee with which
they seized either sword or oar. “Foes are they,”
sang a Roman poet of the time, “fierce beyond
other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea
is their school of war and the storm their friend;
they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the
world!”

Britain

Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay
nearest to the Empire, and they were naturally
the first to touch the Roman world; at the
close of the third century indeed their boats
appeared in such force in the English Channel as

1-029]

to call for a special fleet to resist them. The
piracy of our fathers had thus brought them to
the shores of a land which, dear as it is now to
Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by
English feet. This land was Britain. When the
Saxon boats touched its coast the island was the
westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In
the fifty-fifth year before Christ a descent of
Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
and a century after Cæsar’s landing the Emperor
Claudius undertook its conquest. The work was
swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were
over the bulk of the island had passed beneath
the Roman sway and the Roman frontier had
been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde.
The work of civilization followed fast on the
work of the sword. To the last indeed the distance
of the island from the seat of empire left
her less Romanized than any other province of
the west. The bulk of the population scattered
over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts
to have clung to their old law as to their old
language, and to have retained some traditional
allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman
civilization rested mainly on city life, and in
Britain as elsewhere the city was thoroughly
Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York,
governed by their own municipal officers, guarded
by massive walls, and linked together by a network
of magnificent roads which reached from

1-030]

one end of the island to the other, manners,
language, political life, all were of Rome.

For three hundred years the Roman sword
secured order and peace without Britain and
within, and with peace and order came a wide
and rapid prosperity. Commerce sprang up in
ports amongst which London held the first rank;
agriculture flourished till Britain became one of
the corn-exporting countries of the world; the
mineral resources of the province were explored
in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines
of the Forest of Dean. But evils which sapped
the strength of the whole Empire told at last on
the province of Britain. Wealth and population
alike declined under a crushing system of taxation,
under restrictions which fettered industry, under
a despotism which crushed out all local
independence. And with decay within came danger
from without. For centuries past the Roman
frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond
it, the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian
of the African desert, the German of the Danube
or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from
Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the
Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the
Highlands. It was this mass of savage barbarism
which broke upon the Empire as it sank into
decay. In its western dominions the triumph of

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these assailants was complete. The Franks conquered
and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered
and colonized Spain. The Vandals founded
a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians encamped
in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone.
The East-Goths ruled at last in Italy itself.

Conquests of Jute and Saxon

It was to defend Italy against the Goths that
Rome in the opening of the fifth century withdrew
her legions from Britain, and from that
moment the province was left to struggle unaided
against the Picts. Nor were these its only enemies.
While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants
then bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the
boats of Saxon pirates, as we have seen, were swarming
off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
thirty years Britain held bravely out against these
assailants; but civil strife broke its powers of
resistance, and its rulers fell back at last on the
fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom
while striving to avert it, the policy of matching
barbarian against barbarian. By the usual promises
of land and pay a band of warriors was
drawn for this purpose from Jutland in 449 with
two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at their head.
If by English history we mean the history of
Englishmen in the land which from that time they
made their own, it is with this landing of Hengest’s
war-band that English history begins. They
landed on the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a
spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No spot can be so

1-032]

sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt
the tread of English feet. There is little to catch
the eye in Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of ground
with a few grey cottages dotted over it, cut off
nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow
and a sea-wall. But taken as a whole the scene
has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the
crescent of Pegwell Bay; far away to the left
across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths
mark the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the
coast-line trends dimly towards Deal. Everything
in the character of the spot confirms the national
tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our
fathers; for the physical changes of the country
since the fifth century have told little on its main
features. At the time of Hengest’s landing a
broad inlet of sea parted Thanet from the mainland
of Britain; and through this inlet the pirate
boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind
to what was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.

The work for which the mercenaries had been
hired was quickly done; and the Picts are said to
have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from
the Pict was hardly over when danger came from
the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
have flocked from the Channel to their settlement
in Thanet; the inlet between Thanet and the
mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won

1-033]

their first victory over the Britons in forcing their
passage of the Medway at the village of Aylesford.
A second defeat at the passage of the Cray drove
the British forces in terror upon London; but the
ground was soon won back again, and it was not
till 465 that a series of petty conflicts which had
gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for
a decisive struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however
the overthrow was so terrible that from this
moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems
to have been abandoned, and it was only along its
southern shore that the Britons held their ground.
Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over,
and with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls
look from the slope to which they cling over the
great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
English conqueror was done.

The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from
the Jutes, the smallest of the three tribes who
were to blend in the English people. But the
greed of plunder now told on the great tribe
which stretched from the Elbe to the Rhine, and
in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly
along the strip of land which lay westward of
Kent between the weald and the sea. Nowhere
has the physical aspect of the country more utterly
changed. A vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and
waste which then bore the name of the Andredsweald
stretched for more than a hundred miles
from the borders of Kent to the Hampshire

1-034]

Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames
and leaving only a thin strip of coast which now
bears the name of Sussex between its southern
edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
fortress which occupied the spot now called
Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman
Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of Anderida
in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons.
“Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida,” so ran
the pitiless record of the conquerors, “and slew
all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one
Briton left.” But Hengest and Ælle’s men had
touched hardly more than the coast, and the true
conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a
fresh band of Saxons, a tribe known as the
Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and
pushed to the great downs or Gwent where Winchester
offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the strife
fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a
decisive victory at Charford ended the struggle for
the “Gwent” and set the crown of the West-Saxons
on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt
around it checked any further advance; and
only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the
invaders as they pressed westward through the
Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed
by a long pause in the Saxon advance from

1-035]

the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested
a series of victories whose history is lost was
giving to men of the same Saxon tribe the coast
district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
probable however that the strength of Camulodunum,
the predecessor of our modern Colchester,
made the progress of these assailants a slow and
doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled
the East-Saxons to occupy the territory to
which they have given their name of Essex a line
of woodland which has left its traces in Epping
and Hainault Forests checked their further
advance into the island.

Conquests of the Eagle

Though seventy years had passed since the
victory of Aylesford only the outskirts of Britain
were won. The invaders were masters as yet but
of Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From
London to St. David’s Head, from the Andredsweald
to the Firth of Forth the country still
remained unconquered: and there was little in
the years which followed Arthur’s triumph to
herald that onset of the invaders which was soon
to make Britain England. Till now its assailants
had been drawn from two only of the three tribes
whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from
the Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of
conquest was to be done by the third, by the
tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen
which was to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to
stamp itself on the people which sprang from the

1-036]

union of the conquerors as on the land that they
won. The Engle had probably been settling for
years along the coast of Northumbria and in the
great district which was cut off from the rest of
Britain by the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia.
But it was not till the moment we have
reached that the line of defences which had
hitherto held the invaders at bay was turned by
their appearance in the Humber and the Trent.
This great river-line led like a highway into the
heart of Britain; and civil strife seems to have
broken the strength of British resistance. But of
the incidents of this final struggle we know
nothing. One part of the English force marched
from the Humber over the Yorkshire wolds to
found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans.
Under the Empire political power had centred in
the district between the Humber and the Roman
wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain;
villas of rich landowners studded the valley of the
Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison maintained in
the island lay camped along its northern border.
But no record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or
how the Engle made themselves masters of the
uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
settlements that we follow their march into the
heart of Britain. Seizing the valley of the Don
and whatever breaks there were in the woodland
that then filled the space between the Humber
and the Trent, the Engle followed the curve of

1-037]

the latter river, and struck along the line of its
tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ,
the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe
known as the Middle-English, while a small body
pushed further southwards, and under the name
of “South-Engle” occupied the oolitic upland that
forms our present Northamptonshire. But the
mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line
of the Trent and to have pushed westward to its
head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and Tamworth
mark the country of these western Englishmen,
whose older name was soon lost in that of
Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between
conqueror and conquered; for here the impenetrable
fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire
enabled the Briton to make a fresh and desperate
stand.

Conquests of West-Saxons

It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain
by the Engle that roused the West-Saxons to a
new advance. For thirty years they had rested
inactive within the limits of the Gwent, but in
552 their capture of the hill-fort of Old Sarum
threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs,
and a march of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in
571 made them masters of the districts which now
form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing
along the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at
Barbury Hill they swooped at last from their

1-038]

uplands on the rich prey that lay along the
Severn. Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities
which had leagued under their British kings to
resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an
English victory at Deorham, and the line of the
great western river lay open to the arms of the
conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated
to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town
beside the Wrekin which has been recently brought
again to light, went up in flames. The raid
ended in a crushing defeat which broke the West-Saxon
strength, but a British poet in verses still
left to us sings piteously the death-song of
Uriconium, “the white town in the valley,” the
town of white stone gleaming among the green
woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a
heap of blackened ruins where the singer wandered
through halls he had known in happier days, the
halls of its chief Kyndylan, “without fire, without
light, without song,” their stillness broken only
by the eagle’s scream, the eagle who “has
swallowed fresh drink, heart’s blood of Kyndylan
the fair.”

Britain becomes England

With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the
bulk of Britain was complete. Eastward of a line
which may be roughly drawn along the moorlands
of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire
and the Forest of Arden to the Lower
Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
island had passed into English hands. Britain
had in the main become England. And within
this new England a Teutonic society was settled
on the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest
had yet gone it had been complete. Not a Briton
remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back
from the land which their conquerors had won;
and eastward of the border line which the English
sword had drawn all was now purely English.

It is this which distinguishes the conquest
of Britain from that of other provinces of

1-040]

Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or
that of Italy by the Lombards proved little more
than a forcible settlement of the one or the other
among tributary subjects who were destined in a
long course of ages to absorb their conquerors.
French is the tongue, not of the Frank, but of the
Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the
Lombard is all but unknown in Lombardy. But
the English conquest of Britain up to the point
which we have reached was a sheer dispossession
of the people whom the English conquered. It
was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
times they seem to have been, were more fierce or
more cruel than other Germans who attacked the
Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were
utterly strange to the Roman civilization. Saxon
mercenaries are found as well as Frank mercenaries
in the pay of Rome; and the presence of
Saxon vessels in the Channel for a century before
the descent on Britain must have familiarized its
invaders with what civilization was to be found in
the Imperial provinces of the West. What really
made the difference between the fate of Britain
and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
stubborn courage of the British themselves. In
all the world-wide struggle between Rome and
the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native
resistance met Frank or Visigoth save from the

1-041]

brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
popular revolt broke out against the rule of
Odoacer or Theodoric in Italy. But in Britain
the invader was met by a courage almost equal
to his own. Instead of quartering themselves
quietly, like their fellows abroad, on subjects who
were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
the English had to make every inch of Britain
their own by hard fighting.

This stubborn resistance was backed too by
natural obstacles of the gravest kind. Elsewhere
in the Roman world the work of the conquerors
was aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal
and Frank marched along Roman highways over
ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed
river or ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so
doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain.
But though Britain had long been Roman, her
distance from the seat of Empire left her less
Romanized than any other province of the West.
Socially the Roman civilization had made little
impression on any but the townsfolk, and the
material civilization of the island was yet more
backward than its social. Its natural defences
threw obstacles in its invaders’ way. In the
forest belts which stretched over vast spaces of
country they found barriers which in all cases
checked their advance and in some cases finally
stopped it. The Kentishmen and the South-Saxons
were brought utterly to a standstill by the

1-042]

Andredsweald. The East-Saxons could never
pierce the woods of their western border. The
Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the
Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long
and terrible struggle that the West-Saxons could
hew their way through the forests which sheltered
the “Gwent” of the southern coast. Their attempt
to break out of the circle of woodland which girt
in the downs was in fact fruitless for thirty years;
and in the height of their later power they were
thrown back from the forests of Cheshire.

Withdrawal of the Britons

It is only by realizing in this way the physical
as well as the moral circumstances of Britain that
we can understand the character of its earlier
conquest. Field by field, town by town, forest by
forest, the land was won. And as each bit of
ground was torn away by the stranger, the Briton
sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly
and fight for the next. There is no need to
believe that the clearing of the land meant so
impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the
men who held it. Slaughter there was, no doubt,
on the battle-field or in towns like Anderida whose
long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But
for the most part the Britons were not slaughtered;
they were defeated and drew back. Such a withdrawal
was only made possible by the slowness of
the conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of
its defence which distinguishes the conquest of
Britain from that of the other provinces of the

1-043]

Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the
resistance of the Britons was greater than that of
the other provincials of Rome so the forces of their
assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy
than attack by land, and the numbers who were
brought across by the boats of Hengest or Cerdic
cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric
or Chlodewig across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing
in small parties, and but gradually reinforced
by after-comers, the English invaders could only
slowly and fitfully push the Britons back. The
absence of any joint action among the assailants
told in the same way. Though all spoke the same
language and used the same laws, they had no such
bond of political union as the Franks; and though
all were bent on winning the same land, each band
and each leader preferred their own separate
course of action to any collective enterprise.

The English settlement

Under such conditions the overrunning of
Britain could not fail to be a very different matter
from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English
conquest was may be seen from the fact that it
took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain,
and that the conquest of the bulk of the island
was only wrought out after two centuries of bitter
warfare. But it was just through the length of
the struggle that of all the German conquests this
proved the most thorough and complete. So far

1-044]

as the English sword in these earlier days had
reached, Britain had become England, a land, that
is, not of Britons but of Englishmen. Even if
a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves
round the homesteads of their English conquerors,
or a few of their household words mingled with
the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as
these leave the main facts untouched. The keynote
of the conquest was firmly struck. When
the English invasion was stayed for a while by the
civil wars of the invaders, the Briton had
disappeared from the greater part of the land which
had been his own; and the tongue, the religion,
the laws of his English conquerors reigned without
a break from Essex to Staffordshire and from the
British Channel to the Firth of Forth.

For the driving out of the Briton was, as we
have seen, but a prelude to the settlement of his
conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
England is this, that it was the one purely German
nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In
other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though
they were equally conquered by German peoples,
religion, social life, administrative order, still
remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
province of the Empire where Rome died into a
vague tradition of the past. The whole organization
of government and society disappeared with the
people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led
to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill

1-045]

and down. The old divisions of the land remained
to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new
settlers. The Roman church, the Roman country-house,
was left standing, though reft of priest and
lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the
coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics
of our English fathers, but of a world which our
fathers’ sword swept utterly away. Its law, its
literature, its manners, its faith, went with it.
Nothing was a stronger proof of the completeness
of this destruction of all Roman life than the
religious change which passed over the land.
Alone among the German assailants of Rome the
English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire
they helped to overthrow. The new England was
a heathen country. Homestead and boundary, the
very days of the week, bore the names of new
gods who displaced Christ.

As we stand amidst the ruins of town or
country-house which recall to us the wealth and
culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that
a conquest which left them heaps of crumbling
stones was other than a curse to the land over
which it passed. But if the new England which
sprang from the wreck of Britain seemed for the
moment a waste from which the arts, the letters,
the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly
away, it contained within itself germs of a nobler
life than that which had been destroyed. The
base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout

1-046]

the Roman world was the slave, the peasant
who had been crushed by tyranny, political and
social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
society was the freeman whom we have seen
tilling, judging, or fighting for himself by the
Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with
the material civilization of Britain while the
struggle went on, it was impossible that such a man
could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
sooner over than the warrior settled down into the
farmer, and the home of the ceorl rose beside the
heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site
of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the
English in the conquered land was nothing less
than an absolute transfer of English society in its
completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness
of their advance, the small numbers of each
separate band in its descent upon the coast, made
it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
to call to them when their work was done, the
wives and children, the læt and slave, even the
cattle they had left behind them. The first wave
of conquest was but the prelude to the gradual
migration of a whole people. It was England
which settled down on British soil, England with
its own language, its own laws, its complete social
fabric, its system of village life and village culture,
its township and its hundred, its principle of kinship,
its principle of representation. It was not as
mere pirates or stray war-bands, but as peoples

1-047]

already made, and fitted by a common temper and
common customs to draw together into our English
nation in the days to come, that our fathers left
their German home-land for the land in which we
live. Their social and political organization
remained radically unchanged. In each of the little
kingdoms which rose on the wreck of Britain, the
host camped on the land it had won, and the
divisions of the host supplied here as in its older
home the rough groundwork of local distribution.
The land occupied by the hundred warriors who
formed the unit of military organization became
perhaps the local hundred; but it is needless to
attach any notion of precise uniformity, either in
the number of settlers or in the area of their
settlement, to such a process as this, any more than
to the army organization which the process of
distribution reflected. From the large amount of
public land which we find existing afterwards it
has been conjectured with some probability that
the number of settlers was far too small to occupy
the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
unoccupied ground became “folk-land,” the common
property of the tribe as at a later time of the
nation. What ground was actually occupied may
have been assigned to each group and each family
in the group by lot, and Eorl and Ceorl gathered
round them their læt and slave as in their
homeland by the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the
English people passed to the shores of Britain all

1-048]

that was to make Englishmen what they are. For
distant and dim as their life in that older England
may have seemed to us, the whole after-life of
Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay
our Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts
our Chaucer and our Shakspere; in the pirate-bark
stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully
formed. Civilization, letters, science, religion
itself, have done little to change the inner mood of
Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of
the sea and the fight, that trust in manhood and
the might of man, that silent awe of the mysteries
of life and death which lay deep in English souls
then as now, passed with Englishmen to the land
which Englishmen had won.

The King

But though English society passed thus in its
completeness to the soil of Britain, its primitive
organization was affected in more ways than one
by the transfer. In the first place conquest begat
the King. It seems probable that the English
had hitherto known nothing of kings in their own
fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace
time with the customary government of village-reeve
and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan, while it
gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom
it chose for each campaign. But in the long and
obstinate warfare which they waged against the
Britons it was needful to find a common leader
whom the various tribes engaged in conquests such

1-049]

as those of Wessex or Mercia might follow; and
the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into
a higher position than that of temporary chieftains.
It was no doubt from this cause that we find
Hengest and his son Æsc raised to the kingdom
in Kent, or Ælle in Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric
among the West Saxons. The association of son
with father in this new kingship marked the
hereditary character which distinguished it from
the temporary office of an ealdorman. The change
was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than
the modern conception of kingship would lead us
to imagine. Hereditary as the succession was
within a single house, each successive king was
still the free choice of his people, and for
centuries to come it was held within a people’s
right to pass over a claimant too weak or too
wicked for the throne. In war indeed the king
was supreme. But in peace his power was narrowly
bounded by the customs of his people and
the rede of his wise men. Justice was not as yet
the king’s justice, it was the justice of village and
hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot
and folk-moot. It was only with the assent of the
wise men that the king could make laws and
declare war and assign public lands and name
public officers. Above all, should his will be to
break through the free customs of his people, he
was without the means of putting his will into

1-050]

action, for the one force he could call on was the
host, and the host was the people itself in arms.

The Thegn

With the new English king rose a new order
of English nobles. The social distinction of the
eorl was founded on the peculiar purity of his
blood, on his long descent from the original settler
around whom township and thorpe grew up. A
new distinction was now to be found in service
done to the king. From the earliest times of
German society it had been the wont of young
men greedy of honour or seeking training in arms
to bind themselves as “comrades” to king or chief.
The leader whom they chose gave them horses, arms,
a seat in his mead hall, and gifts from his hoard.
The “comrade” on the other hand–the gesith or
thegn, as he was called–bound himself to follow
and fight for his lord. The principle of personal
dependence as distinguished from the warrior’s
general duty to the folk at large was embodied in
the thegn. “Chieftains fight for victory,” says
Tacitus; “comrades for their chieftain.” When
one of Beowulf’s “comrades” saw his lord hard
bested “he minded him of the homestead he had
given him, of the folk right he gave him as his
father had it; nor might he hold back then.”
Snatching up sword and shield he called on his
fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. “I mind
me of the day,” he cried, “when we drank the
mead, the day we gave pledge to our lord in the
beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that

1-051]

we would pay him back our war-gear, our helms
and our hard swords, if need befel him. Unmeet
is it, methinks, that we should bear back our
shields to our home unless we guard our lord’s
life.” The larger the band of such “comrades,”
the more power and repute it gave their lord. It
was from among the chiefs whose war-band was
strongest that the leaders of the host were
commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into
kings, the number of their thegns naturally
increased. The rank of the “comrades” too rose
with the rise of their lord. The king’s thegns
were his body-guard, the one force ever ready to
carry out his will. They were his nearest and
most constant counsellors. As the gathering of
petty tribes into larger kingdoms swelled the
number of eorls in each realm, and in a corresponding
degree diminished their social importance, it
raised in equal measure the rank of the king’s
thegns. A post among them was soon coveted and
won by the greatest and noblest in the land.
Their service was rewarded by exemption from
the general jurisdiction of hundred-court or shire-court,
for it was part of a thegn’s meed for his
service that he should be judged only by the lord
he served. Other meed was found in grants of
public land which made them a local nobility, no
longer bound to actual service in the king’s
household or the king’s war-band, but still bound
to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than

1-052]

those which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader
of his tribe. In a word, thegnhood contained
within itself the germ of that later feudalism which
was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom
out of which it grew.

The Bernicians

But the strife between the conquering tribes
which at once followed on their conquest of
Britain was to bring about changes even more
momentous in the development of the English
people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle were
making themselves masters of central and southern
Britain, the English who had landed on its
northernmost shores had been slowly winning for
themselves the coast district between the Forth
and the Tyne which bore the name of Bernicia.
Their progress seems to have been small till they
were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the
“Flame-bearer,” who found a site for his King’s
town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough;
nor was it till the reign of his fourth son Æthelric
that they gained full mastery over the Britons
along their western border. But once masters of
the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to
conquer their English neighbours to the south,
the men of Deira, whose first King Ælla was now
sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the
foreign markets with English slaves, and one of
the most memorable stories in our history shows
us a group of such captives as they stood in the
market-place at Rome, it may be in the great

1-053]

Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay recalled
the glories of the Imperial City. Their white
bodies, their fair faces, their golden hair was
noted by a deacon who passed by. “From what
country do these slaves come?” Gregory asked
the trader who brought them. The slave-dealer
answered “They are English,” or as the word ran
in the Latin form it would bear at Rome, “they are
Angles.” The deacon’s pity veiled itself in poetic
humour. “Not Angles but Angels,” he said, “with
faces so angel-like! From what country come
they?” “They come,” said the merchant, “from
Deira.” “De irâ!” was the untranslatable wordplay
of the vivacious Roman–“aye, plucked from
God’s ire and called to Christ’s mercy! And
what is the name of their king?” They told him
“Ælla,” and Gregory seized on the word as of
good omen. “Alleluia shall be sung in Ælla’s
land,” he said, and passed on, musing how the
angel-faces should be brought to sing it.

While Gregory was thus playing with Ælla’s
name the old king passed away, and with his
death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems
to have ceased. His children fled over the western
border to find refuge among the Welsh, and
Æthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph.
A new age of our history opens in this submission
of one English people to another. When the two
kingdoms were united under a common lord the
period of national formation began. If a new

1-054]

England sprang out of the mass of English states
which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe
it to the gradual submission of the smaller peoples
to the supremacy of a common political head.
The difference in power between state and state
which inevitably led to this process of union was
due to the character which the conquest of Britain
was now assuming. Up to this time all the kingdoms
which had been established by the invaders
had stood in the main on a footing of equality.
All had taken an independent share in the work
of conquest. Though the oneness of a common
blood and a common speech was recognized by all
we find no traces of any common action or
common rule. Even in the two groups of kingdoms,
the five English and the five Saxon kingdoms,
which occupied Britain south of the Humber,
the relations of each member of the group to its
fellows seem to have been merely local. It was
only locally that East and West and South and
North English were grouped round the Middle
English of Leicester, or East and West and South
and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about
London. In neither instance do we find any real
trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of one
member of the group over the others; while north
of the Humber the feeling between the Englishmen
of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of
hostility rather than of friendship. But this age

1-055]

of isolation, of equality, of independence, had now
come to an end. The progress of the conquest had
drawn a sharp line between the kingdoms of the
conquerors. The work of half of them was done.
In the south of the island not only Kent but
Sussex, Essex, and Middlesex were surrounded by
English territory, and hindered by that single fact
from all further growth. The same fate had
befallen the East Engle, the South Engle, the
Middle and the North Engle. The West Saxons,
on the other hand, and the West Engle, or
Mercians, still remained free to conquer and
expand on the south of the Humber, as the
Englishmen of Deira and Bernicia remained free
to the north of that river. It was plain, therefore,
that from this moment the growth of these
powers would throw their fellow kingdoms into
the background, and that with an ever-growing
inequality of strength must come a new arrangement
of political forces. The greater kingdoms
would in the end be drawn to subject and absorb
the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman
and Briton would be added a struggle between
Englishman and Englishman.

Kent

It was through this struggle and the establishment
of a lordship on the part of the stronger
and growing states over their weaker and stationary
fellows that the English kingdoms were to make
their first step towards union in a single England.
Such an overlordship seemed destined but a few

1-056]

years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The
victories of Ceawlin and Cuthwulf left it the most
powerful of the English kingdoms. None of its
fellow states seemed able to hold their own
against a power which stretched from the Chilterns
to the Severn and from the Channel to the Ouse.
But after its defeat in the march upon Chester
Wessex suddenly broke down into a chaos of
warring tribes; and her place was taken by two
powers whose rise to greatness was as sudden as
her fall. The first of these was Kent. The
Kentish king Æthelberht found himself hemmed
in on every side by English territory; and since
conquest over Britons was denied him he sought a
new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at
the head of the conquerors of the south. The
break up of Wessex no doubt aided his attempt;
but we know little of the causes or events which
brought about his success. We know only that
the supremacy of the Kentish king was owned at
last by the English peoples of the east and centre
of Britain. But it was not by her political action
that Kent was in the end to further the creation
of a single England; for the lordship which
Æthelberht built up was doomed to fall for ever
with his death, and yet his death left Kent the
centre of a national union far wider as it was far
more enduring than the petty lordship which
stretched over Eastern Britain. Only three or four
years after Gregory had pitied the English slaves

1-057]

in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as
Bishop of the Imperial City in a position to carry
out his dream of winning Britain to the faith; and
an opening was given him by Æthelberht’s marriage
with Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king
Charibert of Paris. Bertha like her Frankish
kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop
accompanied her from Gaul; and a ruined
Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside
the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for
their worship. The king himself remained true
to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no
doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot,
Augustine, at the head of a band of monks to
preach the Gospel to the English people. The
missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet,
at the spot where Hengest had landed more than
a century before; and Æthelberht received them
sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above
Minster, where the eye nowadays catches miles
away over the marshes the dim tower of Canterbury.
The king listened patiently to the long
sermon of Augustine as the interpreters the abbot
had brought with him from Gaul rendered it in
the English tongue. “Your words are fair,”
Æthelberht replied at last with English good
sense, “but they are new and of doubtful meaning.”
For himself, he said, he refused to forsake
the gods of his fathers, but with the usual religious
tolerance of the German race he promised shelter

1-058]

and protection to the strangers. The band of
monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a
silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing
in concert the strains of the litany of their Church.
“Turn from this city, O Lord,” they sang, “Thine
anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house,
for we have sinned.” And then in strange contrast
came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew
worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in
prophetic earnestness from the name of the
Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place,
“Alleluia!”

Christian England

It was thus that the spot which witnessed the
landing of Hengest became yet better known as
the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a
reversal and undoing of the first. “Strangers
from Rome” was the title with which the missionaries
first fronted the English king. The
march of the monks as they chaunted their solemn
litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric.
It was to the tongue and the thought not of
Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Æthelberht
listened in the preaching of Augustine.
Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
England, became a centre of Latin influence. The
Roman tongue became again one of the tongues
of Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence,

1-059]

its literature. But more than the
tongue of Rome returned with Augustine. Practically
his landing renewed that union with the
Western world which the landing of Hengest had
destroyed. The new England was admitted into
the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
art, letters, which had fled before the sword
of the English conquerors returned with the
Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law
indeed never took root in England, but it is
impossible not to recognize the result of the influence
of the Roman missionaries in the fact that
codes of the customary English law began to be
put in writing soon after their arrival.

Æthelfrith

A year passed before Æthelberht yielded to
the preaching of Augustine. But from the moment
of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly
and the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the
train of their king. The new religion was carried
beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy
which Æthelberht wielded over the neighbouring
kingdoms. Sæberht, King of the East-Saxons, received
a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered
him to build up again a Christian church in what
was now his subject city of London, while soon after
the East-Anglian king Rædwald resolved to serve
Christ and the older gods together. But while
Æthelberht was thus furnishing a future centre
of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to which
Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria

1-060]

was pointing it out as the coming political
centre of the new England. In 593, four years
before the landing of the missionaries in Kent,
Æthelric was succeeded by his son Æthelfrith,
and the new king took up the work of conquest
with a vigour greater than had yet been shown
by any English leader. For ten years he waged
war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a tract
which stretched along his western border from
Dumbarton to Carlisle. The contest ended in a
great battle at Dægsastan, perhaps Dawston in
Liddesdale; and Æthelfrith turned to deliver a
yet more crushing blow on his southern border.
British kingdoms still stretched from Clyde-mouth
to the mouth of Severn; and had their line
remained unbroken the British resistance might
yet have withstood the English advance. It was
with a sound political instinct therefore that
Æthelfrith marched in 613 upon Chester, the
point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a kingdom
which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked
itself to the British states of what we now call
Wales. Hard by the city two thousand monks
were gathered in one of those vast religious
settlements which were characteristic of Celtic
Christianity, and after a three days’ fast a crowd
of these ascetics followed the British army to the
field. Æthelfrith watched the wild gestures of
the monks as they stood apart from the host with
arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay

1-061]

them in the coming fight. “Bear they arms or no,”
said the King, “they war against us when they cry
against us to their God,” and in the surprise and
rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.

With the battle of Chester Britain as a country
ceased to exist. By their victory at Deorham the
West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint,
of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall,
from the general body of their race. By Æthelfrith’s
victory at Chester and the reduction of
southern Lancashire which followed it what remained
of Britain was broken into two several
parts. From this time therefore the character of the
English conquest of Britain changes. The warfare
of Briton and Englishman died down into a warfare
of separate English kingdoms against separate
British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians
and Strathclyde, of Mercia against the Welsh
between Anglesea and the British Channel, of
Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip
to the Land’s End. But great as was the importance
of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of Britain,
it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of
England itself. The drift towards national unity
had already begun, but from the moment of
Æthelfrith’s victory this drift became the main
current of our history. Masters of the larger and
richer part of the land, its conquerors were no
longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of
plunder; while the severance of the British kingdoms

1-062]

took from their enemies the pressure of a
common danger. The conquests of Æthelfrith
left him without a rival in military power, and he
turned from victories over the Welsh, as their
English foes called the Britons, to the building up
of a lordship over his own countrymen.

Eadwine

The power of Æthelberht seems to have declined
with old age, and though the Essex men
still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of
Mid-Britain shook it off. So strong however had
the instinct of union now become, that we hear
nothing of any return to their old isolation.
Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and
South-English now owned the lordship of the
East-English King Rædwald. The shelter given
by Rædwald to Ælla’s son Eadwine served as a
pretext for a Northumbrian attack. Fortune
however deserted Æthelfrith, and a snatch of
northern song still tells of the day when the river
Idle by Retford saw his defeat and fall. But the
greatness of Northumbria survived its king. In
617 Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men
of Deira; and his conquest of Bernicia maintained
that union of the two realms which the Bernician
conquest of Deira had first brought about. The
greatness of Northumbria now reached its height.
Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a
genius for civil government which shows how
utterly the mere age of conquest had passed away.
With him began the English proverb so often

1-063]

applied to after kings: “A woman with her babe
might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine’s
day.” Peaceful communication revived along the
deserted highways; the springs by the roadside
were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set
beside each for the traveller’s refreshment. Some
faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung
their glory round this new “Empire of the
English”; a royal standard of purple and gold
floated before Eadwine as he rode through the
villages; a feather tuft attached to a spear, the
Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through
the streets. The Northumbrian king became in
fact supreme over Britain as no king of English
blood had been before. Northward his frontier
reached to the Firth of Forth, and here, if we
trust tradition, Eadwine founded a city which
bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine’s burgh. To
the west his arms crushed the long resistance of
Elmet, the district about Leeds; he was master
of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued
the isles of Anglesea and Man. South of
the Humber he was owned as overlord by the five
English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons
remained awhile independent. But revolt and
slaughter had fatally broken their power when
Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by
Bæda tells something of the fierceness of the
struggle which ended in the subjection of the
south to the overlordship of Northumbria. In an

1-064]

Easter-court which he held in his royal city by
the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to
Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who brought a
message from its king. In the midst of the
conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger
from his robe, and rushed on the Northumbrian
sovereign. Lilla, one of the king’s war-band,
threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin;
but so furious was the stroke that even through
Lilla’s body the dagger still reached its aim. The
king however recovered from his wound to march
on the West-Saxons; he slew or subdued all who
had conspired against him, and returned victorious
to his own country.

Conversion of Northumbria

Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its
King’s daughter as a wife, a step which probably
marked political subordination; and with the
Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine’s
followers, whose tall stooping form, slender
aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
worn face, were long remembered in the North.
Moved by his queen’s prayers Eadwine promised
to become Christian if he returned successful from
Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria
gathered to deliberate on the new faith to which
he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as
now in the light it threw on the darkness which
encompassed men’s lives, the darkness of the
future as of the past. “So seems the life of man,
O king,” burst forth an aged ealdorman, “as a

1-065]

sparrow’s flight through the hall when one is
sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm
without. The sparrow flies in at one door and
tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other
vanishes into the darkness whence it came.
So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
sight, but what is before it, what after it, we
know not. If this new teaching tell us aught
certainly of these, let us follow it.” Coarser
argument told on the crowd. “None of your
people, Eadwine, have worshipped the gods more
busily than I,” said Coifi the priest, “yet there
are many more favoured and more fortunate.
Were these gods good for anything they would
help their worshippers.” Then leaping on horseback,
he hurled his spear into the sacred temple
at Godmanham, and with the rest of the Witan
embraced the religion of the king.

Penda

But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not
to fall without a struggle. Even in Kent a
reaction against the new creed began with the
death of Æthelberht. The young kings of the
East-Saxons burst into the church where the
Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist
to the people, crying, “Give us that white bread
you gave to our father Saba,” and on the bishop’s
refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier
tide of reaction was checked by Eadwine’s conversion;

1-066]

but Mercia, which had as yet owned the
supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden
greatness as the champion of the heathen gods.
Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of the old
religion a chance of winning back his people’s
freedom and giving it the lead among the tribes
about it. Originally mere settlers along the
Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the
Welsh border invited them to widen their possessions
by conquest while the rest of their Anglian
neighbours were shut off from any chance of
expansion. Their fights along the frontier too
kept their warlike energy at its height. Penda
must have already asserted his superiority over the
four other English tribes of Mid-Britain before he
could have ventured to attack Wessex and tear
from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and
Magesætas on the Severn. Even with this accession
of strength however he was still no match for
Northumbria. But the war of the English people
with the Britons seems at this moment to have
died down for a season, and the Mercian ruler
boldly broke through the barrier which had
parted the two races till now by allying himself
with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a joint attack
on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place
called the Heathfield, and in the fight which
followed Eadwine was defeated and slain.

Oswald

Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall
the line of Æthelfrith to its throne; and after a

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year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in
the heart of the north, and Oswald’s first fight
was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian
force gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and
pledged itself at the new King’s bidding to become
Christian if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon
fell fighting on the “Heaven’s Field,” as after
times called the field of battle; the submission of
Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of
Northumbria; and for seven years the power of
Oswald equalled that of Eadwine. It was not the
Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this
struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in
Bernicia the work of conversion which his victory
began. Paulinus fled from Northumbria at Eadwine’s
fall; and the Roman Church, though
established in Kent, did little in contending elsewhere
against the heathen reaction. Its place in
the conversion of northern England was taken by
missionaries from Ireland. To understand the
true meaning of this change we must remember
how greatly the Christian Church in the west had
been affected by the German invasion. Before
the landing of the English in Britain the Christian
Church stretched in an unbroken line across
Western Europe to the furthest coasts of Ireland.
The conquest of Britain by the pagan English
thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of
this great communion and broke it into two

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unequal parts. On one side lay Italy, Spain, and
Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to and
remained in direct contact with the See of Rome,
on the other, practically cut off from the general
body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland.
But the condition of the two portions of Western
Christendom was very different. While the
vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and
Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle for life,
Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders,
drew from its conversion an energy such as it has
never known since. Christianity was received
there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and
letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train.
The science and Biblical knowledge which fled
from the Continent took refuge in its schools.
The new Christian life soon beat too strongly to
brook confinement within the bounds of Ireland
itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island,
had not been half a century dead when Irish
Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into
battle with the mass of heathenism which was
rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries
laboured among the Picts of the Highlands
and among the Frisians of the northern
seas. An Irish missionary, Columban, founded
monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines.
The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its
name another Irish missionary before whom the
spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over the waters

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of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed
as if the course of the world’s history was to be
changed, as if the older Celtic race that Roman
and German had swept before them had turned to
the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if
Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould
the destinies of the Churches of the West.

Aidan

On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the
west coast of Scotland an Irish refugee, Columba,
had raised the famous mission-station of Iona. It
was within its walls that Oswald in youth found
refuge, and on his accession to the throne of
Northumbria he called for missionaries from among
its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to
his call obtained little success. He declared on his
return that among a people so stubborn and
barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was
impossible. “Was it their stubbornness or your
severity?” asked Aidan, a brother sitting by;
“did you forget God’s word to give them the milk
first and then the meat?” All eyes turned on the
speaker as fittest to undertake the abandoned
mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed
his bishop’s see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne.
Thence, from a monastery which gave to
the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers
poured forth over the heathen realms. Aidan
himself wandered on foot, preaching among the
peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his
own court the King acted as interpreter to the

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Irish missionaries in their efforts to convert his
thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed
began to blend itself with that of the warlike glory
of Æthelfrith or the wise administration of Eadwine,
and the moral power which was to reach its
height in Ælfred first dawns in the story of
Oswald. For after times the memory of Oswald’s
greatness was lost in the memory of his piety.
“By reason of his constant habit of praying or
giving thanks to the Lord he was wont wherever
he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees.”
As he feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the
thegn, or noble of his war-band, whom he had set
to give alms to the poor at his gate told him of a
multitude that still waited fasting without. The
king at once bade the untasted meat before him be
carried to the poor, and his silver dish be parted
piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal
hand and blessed it. “May this hand,” he cried,
“never grow old.”

Oswald’s lordship stretched as widely over
Britain as that of his predecessor Eadwine. In
him even more than in Eadwine men saw some
faint likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed
a writer from the land of the Picts calls Oswald
“Emperor of the whole of Britain.” His power
was bent to carry forward the conversion of all
England, but prisoned as it was to the central
districts of the country heathendom fought
desperately for life. Penda was still its rallying-point.

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His long reign was one continuous battle
with the new religion; but it was a battle rather
with the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than
with the supremacy of the Cross. East-Anglia
became at last the field of contest between the
two powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to
deliver it from the Mercian rule. But his doom
was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called
the battle of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and
slain. For a few years after his victory at the
Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain.
Heathenism triumphed with him. If Wessex did
not own his overlordship as it had owned that of
Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith
which he had embraced but a few years back at
the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira seems to
have owned Penda’s sway. Bernicia alone, though
distracted by civil war between rival claimants for
its throne, refused to yield. Year by year the
Mercian king carried his ravages over the north;
once he reached even the royal city, the impregnable
rock-fortress of Bamborough. Despairing
of success in an assault, he pulled down the
cottages around, and piling their wood against its
walls fired the mass in a fair wind that drove the
flames on the town. “See, Lord, what ill Penda
is doing,” cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the
islet of Farne, as he saw the smoke drifting over
the city, and a change of wind–so ran the legend
of Northumbria’s agony–drove back the flames

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on those who kindled them. But burned and
harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the
Cross. Oswiu, a third son of Æthelfrith, held his
ground stoutly against Penda’s inroads till their
cessation enabled him to build up again the old
Northumbrian kingdom by a march upon Deira.
The union of the two realms was never henceforth
to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen
in the renewal of Christianity throughout Britain.
East-Anglia, conquered as it was, had clung to its
faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again.
Penda’s own son, whom he had set over the
Middle-English, received baptism and teachers from
Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the new
belief appeared fearlessly among the Mercians
themselves. Penda gave them no hindrance. In
words that mark the temper of a man of whom we
would willingly know more, Bæda tells us that the
old king only “hated and scorned those whom he
saw not doing the works of the faith they had
received.” His attitude shows that Penda looked
with the tolerance of his race on all questions of
creed, and that he was fighting less for heathenism
than for political independence. And now the
growing power of Oswiu called him to the old
struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met Oswiu
in the field of Winwæd by Leeds. It was in vain
that the Northumbrian sought to avert Penda’s
attack by offers of ornaments and costly gifts.
“If the pagans will not accept them,” Oswiu cried

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at last, “let us offer them to One that will”; and
he vowed that if successful he would dedicate his
daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries
in his realm. Victory at last declared for the
faith of Christ. Penda himself fell on the field.
The river over which the Mercians fled was swollen
with a great rain; it swept away the fragments of
the heathen host, and the cause of the older gods
was lost for ever.

Oswiu

The terrible struggle between heathendom and
Christianity was followed by a long and profound
peace. For three years after the battle of Winwæd
Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in
Oswiu’s name. The winning of central England
was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for
Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathendom was
dead with Penda. “Being thus freed,” Bæda tells
us, “the Mercians with their King rejoiced to
serve the true King, Christ.” Its three provinces,
the earlier Mercia, the Middle-English, and the
Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the
missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield
is still dedicated. Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne,
so simple and lowly in temper that he
travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till
Archbishop Theodore with his own hands lifted
him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry breaks
out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of
singers singing sweetly descended from heaven to
the little cell beside St. Mary’s Church where the

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bishop lay dying. Then “the same song ascended
from the roof again, and returned heavenward by
the way that it came.” It was the soul of his
brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of
angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda.

Cuthbert

In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries
has almost been lost in the glory of
Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the
new religious life of the time than the story of
this Apostle of the Lowlands. Born on the
southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert
found shelter at eight years old in a widow’s
house in the little village of Wrangholm. Already
in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
which caught even in the chance word of a game
a call to higher things, and a passing attack of
lameness deepened the religious impression. A
traveller coming in his white mantle over the
hillside and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert’s
injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy’s
shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still
famous as a sheepwalk, though a scant herbage
scarce veils the whinstone rock. There meteors
plunging into the night became to him a company
of angelic spirits carrying the soul of Bishop
Aidan heavenward, and his longings slowly settled
into a resolute will towards a religious life. In
651 he made his way to a group of straw-thatched
log-huts, in the midst of an untilled solitude, where
a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in

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the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land
is a land of poetry and romance. Cheviot and
Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and
border minstrelsy. Agriculture has chosen its
valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage and
steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm
and meadow. But to see the Lowlands as they
were in Cuthbert’s day we must sweep meadow
and farm away again, and replace them by vast
solitudes, dotted here and there with clusters of
wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
which travellers rode spear in hand and eye
kept cautiously about them. The Northumbrian
peasantry among whom he journeyed were for
the most part Christians only in name. With
Teutonic indifference they yielded to their thegns
in nominally accepting the new Christianity as
these had yielded to the king. But they retained
their old superstitions side by side with the new
worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a
reliance on their heathen charms and amulets;
and if trouble befell the Christian preachers who
came settling among them, they took it as proof
of the wrath of the older gods. When some log-rafts
which were floating down the Tyne for the
construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with
the monks who were at work on them out to sea,
the rustic bystanders shouted, “Let nobody pray
for them; let nobody pity these men; for they

1-076]

have taken away from us our old worship, and
how their new-fangled customs are to be kept
nobody knows.” On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert
wandered among listeners such as these, choosing
above all the remoter mountain villages from
whose roughness and poverty other teachers
turned aside. Unlike his Irish comrades, he
needed no interpreter as he passed from village
to village; the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians
listened willingly to one who was himself a
peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught
the rough Northumbrian burr along the banks of
the Tweed. His patience, his humorous good
sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him,
and not less the stout vigorous frame which fitted
the peasant-preacher for the hard life he had
chosen. “Never did man die of hunger who
served God faithfully,” he would say, when nightfall
found them supperless in the waste. “Look at
the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him
if He will”–and once at least he owed his meal to
a fish that the scared bird let fall. A snowstorm
drove his boat on the coast of Fife. “The snow
closes the road along the shore,” mourned his
comrades; “the storm bars our way over sea.”
“There is still the way of heaven that lies open,”
said Cuthbert.

Cædmon

While missionaries were thus labouring among
its peasantry, Northumbria saw the rise of a number
of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict ties

1-077]

of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose
Celtic model of the family or the clan round some
noble and wealthy person who sought devotional
retirement. The most notable and wealthy of
these houses was that of Streoneshealh, where Hild,
a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on the
cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern
Sea. Hild was a Northumbrian Deborah whose
counsel was sought even by kings; and the double
monastery over which she ruled became a seminary
of bishops and priests. The sainted John of
Beverley was among her scholars. But the name
which really throws glory over Whitby is the
name of a cowherd from whose lips during the
reign of Oswiu flowed the first great English song.
Though well advanced in years, Cædmon had
learned nothing of the art of verse, the alliterative
jingle so common among his fellows, “wherefore
being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for
glee’s sake to sing in turn, he no sooner saw the
harp come towards him than he rose from the
board and went homewards. Once when he had
done thus, and gone from the feast to the stable
where he had that night charge of the cattle, there
appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting
him by name, ‘Sing, Cædmon, some song to Me.’
‘I cannot sing,’ he answered; ‘for this cause left
I the feast and came hither.’ He who talked with
him answered, ‘However that be, you shall sing
to Me.’ ‘What shall I sing?’ rejoined Cædmon.

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‘The beginning of created things,’ replied He.
In the morning the cowherd stood before Hild
and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike
concluded ‘that heavenly grace had been conferred
on him by the Lord.’ They translated for
Cædmon a passage in Holy Writ, ‘bidding him,
if he could, put the same into verse.’ The next
morning he gave it them composed in excellent
verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the
divine grace in the man, bade him quit the
secular habit and take on him the monastic life.”
Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown
into Cædmon’s poem. “He sang of the creation
of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the
history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt
and entering into the Promised Land; of the
incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ,
and of His ascension; of the terror of future
judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys
of heaven.”

Synod of Whitby

But even while Cædmon was singing the glories
of Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing
away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as
its fall. Only a few years after Penda’s defeat
the Mercians threw off Oswin’s yoke and set Wulfhere,
a son of Penda, on their throne. They were aided
in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife
which was now rending the Northumbrian realm.
The labour of Aidan, the victories of Oswald and
Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the

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Irish Church. The monks of Lindisfarne, or of
the new religious houses whose foundation followed
that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical
tradition, not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted
for their guidance the instructions, not of Gregory,
but of Columba. Whatever claims of supremacy
over the whole English Church might be pressed
by the see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of
the Church as it existed in the North of England
was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu’s queen brought
with her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish
Church to the Roman See; and the visit of two
young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love
of Rome into a passionate fanaticism. The elder
of these, Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce
the usages in which the Irish Church differed from
the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his
comrade Wilfrid stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu
was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great
council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical
allegiance of his realm should be decided. The
points actually contested were trivial enough.
Colman, Aidan’s successor at Holy Island, pleaded
for the Irish fashion of the tonsure, and for the
Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid pleaded for
the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the
authority of Columba, the other to that of St.
Peter. “You own,” cried the king at last to
Colman, “that Christ gave to Peter the keys of
the kingdom of heaven–has He given such power

1-080]

to Columba?” The bishop could but answer
“No.” “Then will I rather obey the porter of
heaven,” said Oswiu, “lest when I reach its gates
he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back
on me, and there be none to open.” The humorous
tone of Oswiu’s decision could not hide its
importance, and the synod had no sooner broken
up than Colman, followed by the whole of the
Irish-born brethren and thirty of their English
fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed
away to Iona. Trivial in fact as were the actual
points of difference which severed the Roman
Church from the Irish, the question to which
communion Northumbria should belong was of
immense moment to the after fortunes of England.
Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later
ecclesiastical history of England would probably
have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid of that
power of organization which was the strength of
the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own
Irish home took the clan system of the country as
the basis of its government. Tribal quarrels and
ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably
confounded; and the clergy, robbed of all really
spiritual influence, contributed no element save
that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering
bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by
hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from
morality, the absence of those larger and more
humanizing influences which contact with a wider

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world alone can give, this is a picture which the
Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was
from such a chaos as this that England was saved
by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church
it must have remained spiritually isolated from
the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
might be from its older greatness, it preserved
the traditions of civilization, of letters and art and
law. Its faith still served as a bond which held
together the nations that sprang from the wreck
of the Empire. To fight against Rome was, as
Wilfrid said, “to fight against the world.” To
repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation.
Dimly as such thoughts may have presented
themselves to Oswiu’s mind, it was the instinct of
a statesman that led him to set aside the love and
gratitude of his youth and to link England to
Rome in the Synod of Whitby.

Theodore

Oswiu’s assent to the vigorous measures of
organization undertaken by a Greek monk, Theodore
of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to
secure England to her sway as Archbishop of
Canterbury, marked a yet more decisive step in
the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly
in the organization of the episcopate, and thus the
Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the
work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
Theodore. His work was determined in its main

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outlines by the previous history of the English
people. The conquest of the Continent had been
wrought either by races which were already Christian,
or by heathens who bowed to the Christian
faith of the nations they conquered. To this oneness
of religion between the German invaders of
the Empire and their Roman subjects was owing
the preservation of all that survived of the Roman
world. The Church everywhere remained untouched.
The Christian bishop became the defender
of the conquered Italian or Gaul against
his Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator
between the German and his subjects, the one
bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression.
To the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the
representative of all that was venerable in the
past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people
had been driven out together. When Theodore
came to organize the Church of England, the very
memory of the older Christian Church which
existed in Roman Britain had passed away. The
first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in
a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to
the courts of the kings, who were their earliest
converts, and whose conversion was generally
followed by that of their people. The English
bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and
their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
In this way realms which are all but forgotten

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are commemorated in the limits of existing
sees. That of Rochester represented till of late
an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier
of the original kingdom of Mercia may be
recovered by following the map of the ancient
bishopric of Lichfield. In adding many sees to
those he found Theodore was careful to make their
dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations.
But he soon passed from this extension of
the episcopate to its organization. In his arrangement
of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped
them round the see of Canterbury, in his national
synods and ecclesiastical canons, Theodore did
unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which
had sprung for the most part from mere accidents
of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
The smaller states were by this time practically
absorbed by the three larger ones, and of these
three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency
to national unity which was to characterize the
new England had thus already declared itself; but
the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form
and surrounded with divine sanctions a unity
which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury
accustomed men’s minds to the thought of a single
throne for their one temporal overlord. The
regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop

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to primate, in the administration of the Church,
supplied a mould on which the civil organization
of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the
councils gathered by Theodore were the first of
our national gatherings for general legislation. It
was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to
come together in the Witenagemot of all England.
The synods which Theodore convened as religiously
representative of the whole English nation led the
way by their example to our national parliaments.
The canons which these synods enacted led the
way to a national system of law.

Wulfhere

The organization of the episcopate was followed
by the organization of the parish system. The
mission-station or monastery from which priest or
bishop went forth on journey after journey to
preach and baptize naturally disappeared as the
land became Christian. The missionaries turned
into settled clergy. As the king’s chaplain became
a bishop and the kingdom his diocese, so the
chaplain of an English noble became the priest and
the manor his parish. But this parish system is
probably later than Theodore, and the system of
tithes which has been sometimes coupled with his
name dates only from the close of the eighth
century. What was really due to him was the
organization of the episcopate, and the impulse
which this gave to national unity. But the movement
towards unity found a sudden check in the

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revived strength of Mercia. Wulfhere proved a
vigorous and active ruler, and the peaceful reign
of Oswiu left him free to build up again during
fifteen years of rule (659-675) that Mercian
overlordship over the tribes of Mid-England which
had been lost at Penda’s death. He had more
than his father’s success. Not only did Essex
again own his supremacy, but even London fell
into Mercian hands. The West-Saxons were driven
across the Thames, and nearly all their settlements
to the north of that river were annexed to the
Mercian realm. Wulfhere’s supremacy soon reached
even south of the Thames, for Sussex in its dread
of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his
overlordship, and its king was rewarded by a gift
of the two outlying settlements of the Jutes–the
Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras
along the Southampton water–which we must
suppose had been reduced by Mercian arms. The
industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went
hand in hand with its military advance. The
forests of its western border, the marshes of its
eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by
monastic colonies, whose success shows the hold
which Christianity had now gained over its people.
Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild
western woodlands and in the yet wilder
fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom
which stretched from the “Holland,” the sunk,
hollow land of Lincolnshire, to the channel of the

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Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters and reedy
islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted
only by flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either
quarter the new faith made its way. In the western
woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey
round which gathered the town of Evesham, and
the eastern fen-land was soon filled with religious
houses. Here through the liberality of King
Wulfhere rose the Abbey of Peterborough. Here
too, Guthlac, a youth of the royal race of Mercia,
sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes of
Crowland, and so great was the reverence he won,
that only two years had passed since his death
when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over his
tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site;
the buildings rested on oaken piles driven into the
marsh; a great stone church replaced the hermit’s
cell; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed
the pools around them into fertile meadow-land.

Ecgfrith

In spite however of this rapid recovery of its
strength by Mercia, Northumbria remained the
dominant state in Britain: and Ecgfrith, who
succeeded Oswiu in 670, so utterly defeated Wulfhere
when war broke out between them that he
was glad to purchase peace by the surrender
of Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased
more hardly had not Ecgfrith’s ambition
turned rather to conquests over the Briton than
to victories over his fellow Englishmen. The
war between Briton and Englishman which had

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languished since the battle of Chester had been
revived some twelve years before by an advance of
the West-Saxons to the south-west. Unable to
save the possessions of Wessex north of the Thames
from the grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwealh,
sought for compensation in an attack on his Welsh
neighbours. A victory at Bradford on the Avon
enabled him to overrun the country near Mendip
which had till then been held by the Britons; and
a second campaign in 658, which ended in a victory
on the skirts of the great forest that covered
Somerset to the east, settled the West-Saxons as
conquerors round the sources of the Parret. It
may have been the example of the West-Saxons
which spurred Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon
his British neighbours in the west which widened
the bounds of his kingdom. His reign marks the
highest pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies
chased the Britons from the kingdom of Cumbria,
and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A
large part of the conquered country was bestowed
upon the see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time
filled by one whom we have seen before labouring
as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had
found a new mission-station in Holy Island, and
preached among the moors of Northumberland as
he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He
remained there through the great secession which
followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became
prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now

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torn with endless disputes against which his patience
and good humour struggled in vain. Worn out at
last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
of the Farne group not far from Ida’s fortress of
Bamborough, strewn for the most part with kelp
and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and
turf, dug down within deep into the rock, and
roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence
for his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the
vacant see of Lindisfarne. He entered Carlisle,
which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric,
at a moment when all Northumbria was waiting
for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith’s against
the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had
long been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts
to the north of it owned Ecgfrith’s supremacy.
In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense
of coming ill weighed on Northumbria, and its
dread was quickened by a memory of the curses
which had been pronounced by the bishops of
Ireland on its king, when his navy, setting out
a year before from the newly-conquered western
coast, swept the Irish shores in a raid which seemed
like sacrilege to those who loved the home of
Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over
a Roman fountain which still stood unharmed
amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen

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falling from the old man’s lips. “Perhaps,” he
seemed to murmur, “at this very hour the peril
of the fight is over and done.” “Watch and
pray,” he said, when they questioned him on the
morrow; “watch and pray.” In a few days more
a solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told
that the Picts had turned desperately to bay as
the English army entered Fife; and that Ecgfrith
and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of
corpses, on the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.

Mercian greatness

The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian
greatness, for while the Picts pressed on the
kingdom from the north Æthelred, Wulfhere’s
successor, attacked it on the Mercian border, and
the war was only ended by a peace which left him
master of Middle-England and free to attempt the
direct conquest of the south. For the moment
this attempt proved a fruitless one. Mercia was
still too weak to grasp the lordship which was
slipping from Northumbria’s hands, while Wessex
which seemed her destined prey rose at this
moment into fresh power under the greatest of its
early kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king whose
reign covered the long period from 688 to 726,
carried on during the whole of it the war which
Cenwealh and Centwine had begun. He pushed his
way southward round the marshes of the Parret to
a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier
of his new conquests by a fort on the banks of
the Tone which has grown into the present Taunton.

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The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole
district which now bears the name of Somerset.
The conquest of Sussex and of Kent on his eastern
border made Ine master of all Britain south of the
Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king
Ceolred in a bloody encounter at Wanborough in
715 seemed to establish the threefold division of
the English race between three realms of almost
equal power. But able as Ine was to hold Mercia
at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife that
was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells
the story of the disgust which drove him from the
world. He had feasted royally at one of his
country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode
from it, his queen bade him turn back thither.
The king returned to find his house stripped of
curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the
dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he
had slept with Æthelburh rested a sow with her
farrow of pigs. The scene had no need of the
queen’s comment: “See, my lord, how the fashion
of this world passeth away!” In 726 he sought
peace in a pilgrimage to Rome. The anarchy
which had driven Ine from the throne broke out
in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to
Æthelbald, the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian
realm. Æthelbald took up with better fortune
the struggle of his people for supremacy over the
south. He penetrated to the very heart of the
West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege and capture

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of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended
the war. For twenty years the overlordship of
Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of
the Humber. It was at the head of the forces
not of Mercia only but of East-Anglia and Kent,
as well as of the West-Saxons, that Æthelbald
marched against the Welsh on his western border.

Bæda

In so complete a mastery of the south the
Mercian King found grounds for a hope that
Northern Britain would also yield to his sway.
But the dream of a single England was again
destined to be foiled. Fallen as Northumbria was
from its old glory, it still remained a great power.
Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith’s successors,
Aldfrith and Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the
literary centre of Western Europe. No schools
were more famous than those of Jarrow and York.
The whole learning of the age seemed to be
summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. Bæda–the
Venerable Bede as later times styled him–was
born nine years after the Synod of Whitby
on ground which passed a year later to Benedict
Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he
reared by the mouth of the Wear. His youth
was trained and his long tranquil life was
wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict’s house
which was founded by his friend Ceolfrid.
Bæda never stirred from Jarrow. “I spent my
whole life in the same monastery,” he says, “and
while attentive to the rule of my order and the

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service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in
learning, or teaching, or writing.” The words
sketch for us a scholar’s life, the more touching in
its simplicity that it is the life of the first great
English scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life
consecrated to knowledge, the tranquil pleasure
that lies in learning and teaching and writing,
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Bæda.
While still young he became a teacher, and six
hundred monks besides strangers that flocked
thither for instruction formed his school of
Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how among the
toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the
monk, Bæda could have found time for the
composition of the numerous works that made his
name famous in the West. But materials for
study had accumulated in Northumbria through
the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and
the libraries which were forming at Wearmouth
and York. The tradition of the older Irish
teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar
into that path of Scriptural interpretation to which
he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accomplishment
in the West, came to him from the school
which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded
beneath the walls of Canterbury. His skill in the
ecclesiastical chant was derived from a Roman
cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of
Benedict Biscop. Little by little the young
scholar thus made himself master of the whole

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range of the science of his time; he became, as
Burke rightly styled him, “the father of English
learning.” The tradition of the older classic
culture was first revived for England in his
quotations of Plato and Aristotle, of Seneca and
Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses
from the Æneid break his narratives of martyrdoms,
and the disciple ventures on the track of
the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of
the approach of spring. His work was done with
small aid from others. “I am my own secretary,”
he writes; “I make my own notes. I am my
own librarian.” But forty-five works remained
after his death to attest his prodigious industry.
In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries
the most important among these were the commentaries
and homilies upon various books of the
Bible which he had drawn from the writings of
the Fathers. But he was far from confining
himself to theology. In treatises compiled as
textbooks for his scholars, Bæda threw together all
that the world had then accumulated in astronomy
and meteorology, in physics and music, in philosophy,
grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine.
But the encyclopædic character of his researches
left him in heart a simple Englishman. He loved
his own English tongue, he was skilled in English
song, his last work was a translation into English
of the Gospel of St. John, and almost the last

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words that broke from his lips were some English
rimes upon death.

But the noblest proof of his love of England lies
in the work which immortalizes his name. In his
“Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,”
Bæda was at once the founder of mediæval history
and the first English historian. All that we really
know of the century and a half that follows the
landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever
his own personal observation extended, the
story is told with admirable detail and force. He
is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which
he owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and
Nothelm. What he owed to no informant was
his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no
story of his own telling is so touching as the story
of his death. Two weeks before the Easter of 735
the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
and loss of breath. He still preserved however
his usual pleasantness and gay good-humour, and
in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his
lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his
own English tongue broke from time to time from
the master’s lip–rude rimes that told how before
the “need-fare,” Death’s stern “must go,” none
can enough bethink him what is to be his doom
for good or ill. The tears of Bæda’s scholars
mingled with his song. “We never read without
weeping,” writes one of them. So the days rolled
on to Ascension-tide, and still master and pupils

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toiled at their work, for Based longed to bring to
an end his version of St. John’s Gospel into the
English tongue and his extracts from Bishop
Isidore. “I don’t want my boys to read a lie,”
he answered those who would have had him rest,
“or to work to no purpose after I am gone.” A
few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew
upon him, but he spent the whole day in teaching,
only saying cheerfully to his scholars, “Learn
with what speed you may; I know not how long
I may last.” The dawn broke on another sleepless
night, and again the old man called his scholars
round him and bade them write. “There is still
a chapter wanting,” said the scribe, as the morning
drew on, “and it is hard for thee to question
thyself any longer.” “It is easily done,” said
Bæda; “take thy pen and write quickly.” Amid
tears and farewells the day wore on till eventide.
“There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear
master,” said the boy. “Write it quickly,” bade
the dying man. “It is finished now,” said the
little scribe at last. “You speak truth,” said the
master; “all is finished now.” Placed upon the
pavement, his head supported in his scholar’s arms,
his face turned to the spot where he was wont to
pray, Bæda chanted the solemn “Glory to God.”
As his voice reached the close of his song he passed
quietly away.

Fall of Æthelbald

First among English scholars, first among
English theologians, first among English historians,

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it is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature
strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars
who gathered round him for instruction he is the
father of our national education. In his physical
treatises he is the first figure to which our science
looks back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar’s
life was broken by the growing anarchy of
Northumbria, and by threats of war from its
Mercian rival. At last Æthelbald marched on a
state which seemed exhausted by civil discord and
ready for submission to his arms. But its king
Eadberht showed himself worthy of the kings that
had gone before him, and in 740 he threw back
Æthelbald’s attack in a repulse which not only
ruined the Mercian ruler’s hopes of northern
conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
Already goaded to revolt by exactions, the
West-Saxons were roused to a fresh struggle for
independence, and after twelve years of continued
outbreaks the whole people mustered at Burford
under the golden dragon of their race. The fight
was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the
Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a
decisive victory freed Wessex from the Mercian
yoke. Æthelbald’s own throne seems to have
been shaken; for three years later, in 757, the
Mercian king was surprised and slain in a night
attack by his ealdormen, and a year of confusion
passed ere his kinsman Offa could avenge him on
his murderers and succeed to the realm.

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But though Eadberht might beat back the
inroads of the Mercians and even conquer Strathclyde,
before the anarchy of his own kingdom he
could only fling down his sceptre and seek a
refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne. From the
death of Bæda the history of Northumbria became
in fact little more than a wild story of lawlessness
and bloodshed. King after king was swept away
by treason and revolt, the country fell into the
hands of its turbulent nobles, its very fields lay
waste, and the land was scourged by famine and
plague. An anarchy almost as complete fell on
Wessex after the recovery of its freedom. Only
in Mid-England was there any sign of order and
settled rule. The crushing defeat at Burford,
though it had brought about revolts which
stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had
made, was far from having broken the Mercian
power. Under the long reign of Offa, which
went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all
but its old dominion. Since the dissolution of
the temporary alliance which Penda formed with
the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with the
Britons in the west had been the one great
hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under
Offa Mercia braced herself to the completion of
her British conquests. Pushing after 779 over
the Severn, and carrying his ravages into the
heart of Wales, Offa drove the King of Powys
from his capital, which changed its old name

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of Pengwern for the significant English title of
the Town in the Scrub or Bush, Scrobbesbyryg,
Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught the
Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and
Offa resolved to create a military border by
planting a settlement of Englishmen between the
Severn, which had till then served as the western
boundary of the English race, and the huge
“Offa’s Dyke” which he drew from the mouth of
Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later
conquests of the West-Saxons, the old plan of
extermination was definitely abandoned and the
Welsh who chose to remain dwelled undisturbed
among their English conquerors. From these
conquests over the Britons Offa turned to build
up again the realm which had been shattered at
Burford. But his progress was slow. A reconquest
of Kent in 775 woke anew the jealousy
of the West-Saxons; and though Offa defeated
their army at Bensington in 779 the victory was
followed by several years of inaction. It was not
till Wessex was again weakened by fresh anarchy
that he was able in 794 to seize East-Anglia and
restore his realm to its old bounds under Wulfhere.
Further he could not go. A Kentish revolt
occupied him till his death in 796, and his
successor Cenwulf did little but preserve the
realm he bequeathed him. At the close of the
eighth century the drift of the English peoples
towards a national unity was in fact utterly

1-099]

arrested. The work of Northumbria had been
foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of
Mercia had broken down before the resistance of
Wessex. A threefold division seemed to have
stamped itself upon the land; and so complete
was the balance of power between the three
realms which parted it that no subjection of one
to the other seemed likely to fuse the English
tribes into an English people.

The Northmen

The union which each English kingdom in turn
had failed to bring about was brought about by
the pressure of the Northmen. The dwellers in
the isles of the Baltic or on either side of
the Scandinavian peninsula had lain hidden
till now from Western Christendom, waging their
battle for existence with a stern climate, a barren
soil, and stormy seas. It was this hard fight for
life that left its stamp on the temper of Dane,
Swede, or Norwegian alike, that gave them their
defiant energy, their ruthless daring, their passion
for freedom and hatred of settled rule. Forays
and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty
livelihood, and at the close of the eighth century
these raids found a wider sphere than the waters
of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth
garnered in the abbeys and towns of the new
Christendom which had risen from the wreck of

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Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the
coasts of Northern Gaul; and just before Offa’s
death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
To men of that day it must have seemed as
though the world had gone back three hundred
years. The same northern fiords poured forth
their pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or
Cerdic. There was the same wild panic as the
black boats of the invaders struck inland along
the river-reaches or moored round the river isles,
the same sights of horror, firing of homesteads,
slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or
shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the
market-place, as when the English themselves had
attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden;
letters, arts, religion, government disappeared
before these northmen as before the northmen of
three centuries before.

Ecgberht

In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries
of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and the presence of
the freebooters soon told on the political balance
of the English realms. A great revolution was
going on in the south, where Mercia was torn by
civil wars which followed on Cenwulf’s death, while
the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by
a new king, Ecgberht. In Offa’s days Ecgberht
had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex and
had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of
the Franks. He remained there through the

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memorable year during which Charles the Great
restored the Empire of the West, and returned in
802 to be quietly welcomed as King by the West-Saxon
people. A march into the heart of Cornwall
and the conquest of this last fragment of the
British kingdom in the south-west freed his hands
for a strife with Mercia, which broke out in 825
when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into
the heart of Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at
Ellandun gave all England south of Thames to the
West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred
the men of East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt
against Mercia. Two great overthrows at
their hands had already spent its strength when
Ecgberht crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm
of Penda and Offa bowed without a struggle to its
conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than
those of supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream
of a union of all England drew him to the north.
Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts
it stood at the head of the English race; and
under a king like Eadberht it would have withstood
Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood
Æthelbald. But the ruin of Jarrow and Wearmouth
had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn by
civil strife, and desperate of finding in itself the
union needed to meet the northmen, Northumbria
sought union and deliverance in subjection to
a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in
Derbyshire, and owned the supremacy of Wessex.

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Conquests of the Northmen

With the submission of Northumbria the work
which Oswiu and Æthelbald had failed to do was
done, and the whole English race was for the first
time knit together under a single rule. The union
came not a moment too soon. Had the old severance
of people from people, the old civil strife
within each separate realm, gone on it is hard to
see how the attacks of the northmen could have
been withstood. They were already settled in
Ireland; and from Ireland a northern host landed
in 836 at Charmouth in Dorsetshire strong enough
to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet them,
from the field. His victory the year after at
Hengestdun won a little rest for the land; but
Æthelwulf who mounted the throne on Ecgberht’s
death in 839 had to face an attack which was
only beaten off by years of hard fighting. Æthelwulf
fought bravely in defence of his realm; in
his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at
Aclea in 851 he led his troops in person against
the sea-robbers; and his success won peace for
the land through the short and uneventful reigns
of his sons Æthelbald and Æthelberht. But the
northern storm burst in full force upon England
when a third son, Æthelred, followed his brothers
on the throne. The northmen were now settled
on the coast of Ireland and the coast of Gaul;
they were masters of the sea; and from west and
east alike they closed upon Britain. While one
host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north

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of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia
landed in 866 on the coast of East-Anglia under
Ivar the Boneless and marched the next year upon
York. A victory over two claimants of its crown
gave the pirates Northumbrian and seizing the
passage of the Trent they threatened an attack on
the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a march
of King Æthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he
made there with the northmen left them leisure to
prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose
under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before
their leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to
death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen
made Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend;
in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured
windows of church after church along the eastern
coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury
rose over his relics. With him ended the line of
East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not
only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of
the pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its
crown. Already the northmen had turned to the
richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough,
Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their
monks fled or lay slain among the ruins. Mercia,
though still free from actual attack, cowered
panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment
of tribute owned them as its overlords.

Wessex and the Northmen

In five years the work of Ecgberht had been
undone, and England north of the Thames had

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been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So
rapid a change could only have been made possible
by the temper of the conquered kingdoms. To
them the conquest was simply their transfer from
one overlord to another, and it may be that in all
there were men who preferred the overlordship of
the Northman to the overlordship of the West-Saxon.
But the loss of the subject kingdoms left
Wessex face to face with the invaders. The time
had now come for it to fight, not for supremacy,
but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by
terror. With the exception of his one march on
Nottingham, King Æthelred had done nothing to
save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the
pirates no sooner pushed up Thames to Reading
in 871 than the West-Saxons, attacked on their
own soil, turned fiercely at bay. A desperate
attack drove the northmen from Ashdown on the
heights that overlook the Vale of White Horse,
but their camp in the tongue of land between the
Kennet and Thames proved impregnable. Æthelred
died in the midst of the struggle, and his
brother Ælfred, who now became king, bought
the withdrawal of the pirates and a few years’
breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the
quick eye of Ælfred to see that the northmen had
withdrawn simply with the view of gaining firmer
footing for a new attack; three years indeed had
hardly passed before Mercia was invaded and its
under-king driven over sea to make place for a

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tributary of the invaders. From Repton half
their host marched northwards to the Tyne,
while Guthrum led the rest to Cambridge to
prepare for their next year’s attack on Wessex.
In 876 his fleet appeared before Wareham, and
in spite of a treaty bought by Ælfred, the
northmen threw themselves into Exeter. Their
presence there was likely to stir a rising of the
Welsh, and through the winter Ælfred girded
himself for this new peril. At break of spring
his army closed round the town, a hired fleet
cruised off the coast to guard against rescue, and
the defeat of their fellows at Wareham in an attempt
to relieve them drove the pirates to surrender.
They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
Gloucester. But Ælfred had hardly disbanded his
troops when his enemies, roused by the arrival of
fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at
Chippenham, and in the opening of 878 marched
ravaging over the land. The surprise of Wessex
was complete, and for a month or two the general
panic left no hope of resistance. Ælfred, with his
small band of followers, could only throw himself
into a fort raised hastily in the isle of Athelney
among the marshes of the Parret, a position from
which he could watch closely the movements of his
foes. But with the first burst of spring he called
the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still
gathering troops as he moved marched through
Wiltshire on the northmen. He found their host

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at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after
a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender
and to bind themselves by a solemn peace or
“frith” at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the
Peace of Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk
of Britain to its invaders. All Northumbria, all
East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line
which stretched from Thames’ mouth along the
Lea to Bedford, thence along the Ouse to Watling
Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left
subject to the northmen. Throughout this “Danelaw”–as
it was called–the conquerors settled
down among the conquered population as lords of
the soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly
in its central districts, but everywhere guarding
jealously their old isolation and gathering in
separate “heres” or armies round towns which
were only linked in loose confederacies. The
peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex
itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England.
The spell of terror was broken. The tide of invasion
turned. From an attitude of attack the
northmen were thrown back on an attitude of
defence. The whole reign of Ælfred was a preparation
for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back
from the pirates the land they had won.

Ælfred

What really gave England heart for such a
struggle was the courage and energy of the King
himself. Alfred was the noblest as he was the
most complete embodiment of all that is great, all

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that is loveable, in the English temper. He combined
as no other man has ever combined its
practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its
profound sense of duty, the reserve and self-control
that steadies in it a wide outlook and a restless
daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank
geniality, its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic
tenderness, its deep and passionate religion.
Religion indeed was the groundwork of Ælfred’s
character. His temper was instinct with piety.
Everywhere throughout his writings that remain
to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir
him to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he
was no mere saint. He felt none of that scorn of
the world about him which drove the nobler souls
of his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he
was by sickness and constant pain, his temper took
no touch of asceticism. His rare geniality, a
peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave
colour and charm to his life. A sunny frankness
and openness of spirit breathes in the pleasant
chat of his books, and what he was in his books he
showed himself in his daily converse. Ælfred was
in truth an artist, and both the lights and shadows
of his life were those of the artistic temperament.
His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings
of travellers and scholars, betray an
imaginative restlessness that longs to break out of
the narrow world of experience which hemmed him
in. At one time he jots down news of a voyage to

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the unknown seas of the north. At another he
listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from
the churches of Malabar. And side by side with this
restless outlook of the artistic nature he showed its
tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid apprehension
of unseen danger, its craving for affection,
its sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself
rather than with his reader that he communed as
thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and
opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory
or Boethius. “Oh, what a happy man was he,” he
cries once, “that man that had a naked sword
hanging over his head from a single thread; so as
to me it always did!” “Desirest thou power?”
he asks at another time. “But thou shalt never
obtain it without sorrows–sorrows from strange
folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own
kindred.” “Hardship and sorrow!” he breaks
out again, “not a king but would wish to be
without these if he could. But I know that he
cannot!” The loneliness which breathes in words
like these has often begotten in great rulers a
cynical contempt of men and the judgements of
men. But cynicism found no echo in the large
and sympathetic temper of Ælfred. He not only
longed for the love of his subjects, but for the
remembrance of “generations” to come. Nor did
his inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his
vivid and versatile activity. To the scholars he
gathered round him he seemed the very type of a

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scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read
or listen to books read to him. The singers of his
court found in him a brother singer, gathering the
old songs of his people to teach them to his children,
breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple
verse, solacing himself in hours of depression with
the music of the Psalms. He passed from court and
study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in
gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers
their business. But all this versatility and ingenuity
was controlled by a cool good sense.
Ælfred was a thorough man of business. He was
careful of detail, laborious, methodical. He
carried in his bosom a little handbook in which he
noted things as they struck him–now a bit of
family genealogy, now a prayer, now such a story
as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the bridge.
Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there
was the same order in the division of his revenue
and in the arrangement of his court.

Wide however and various as was the King’s
temper, its range was less wonderful than its
harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion,
of the predominance of one quality
over another which goes commonly with an
intensity of moral purpose Ælfred showed not a
trace. Scholar and soldier, artist and man of
business, poet and saint, his character kept that
perfect balance which charms us in no other
Englishman save Shakspere. But full and harmonious

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as his temper was, it was the temper of a
king. Every power was bent to the work of rule.
His practical energy found scope for itself in the
material and administrative restoration of the
wasted land. His intellectual activity breathed
fresh life into education and literature. His
capacity for inspiring trust and affection drew the
hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began
the upbuilding of a new England. And all was
guided, controlled, ennobled by a single aim. “So
long as I have lived,” said the King as life closed
about him, “I have striven to live worthily.”
Little by little men came to know what such a life
of worthiness meant. Little by little they came to
recognize in Ælfred a ruler of higher and nobler
stamp than the world had seen. Never had it
seen a King who lived solely for the good of
his people. Never had it seen a ruler who set
aside every personal aim to devote himself solely
to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was
this grand self-mastery that gave him his power
over the men about him. Warrior and conqueror
as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the
warrior’s dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement
of Wedmore struck the key-note of his reign.
But still more is it this height and singleness of
purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest
faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts Ælfred out
of the narrow bounds of Wessex. If the sphere
of his action seems too small to justify the comparison

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of him with the few whom the world owns
as its greatest men, he rises to their level in the
moral grandeur of his life. And it is this which
has hallowed his memory among his own English
people. “I desire,” said the King in some of his
latest words, “I desire to leave to the men that
come after me a remembrance of me in good
works.” His aim has been more than fulfilled.
His memory has come down to us with a living
distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and
legend which time gathered round it. The
instinct of the people has clung to him with a
singular affection. The love which he won a
thousand years ago has lingered round his name
from that day to this. While every other name of
those earlier times has all but faded from the
recollection of Englishmen, that of Ælfred remains
familiar to every English child.

English Literature

The secret of Ælfred’s government lay in his
own vivid energy. He could hardly have chosen
braver or more active helpers than those whom he
employed both in his political and in his
educational efforts. The children whom he
trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their
time. But at the outset of his reign he stood
alone, and what work was to be done was done
by the King himself. His first efforts were
directed to the material restoration of his realm.
The burnt and wasted country saw its towns built
again, forts erected in positions of danger, new

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abbeys founded, the machinery of justice and
government restored, the laws codified and
amended. Still more strenuous were Ælfred’s
efforts for its moral and intellectual restoration.
Even in Mercia and Northumbria the pirates’
sword had left few survivors of the schools of
Ecgberht or Bæda, and matters were even worse
in Wessex which had been as yet the most
ignorant of the English kingdoms. “When I
began to reign,” said Ælfred, “I cannot remember
one priest south of the Thames who could render
his service-book into English.” For instructors
indeed he could find only a few Mercian prelates
and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser.
“In old times,” the King writes sadly, “men
came hither from foreign lands to seek for instruction,
and now if we are to have it we can
only get it from abroad.” But his mind was far
from being prisoned within his own island. He
sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the
White Sea, and Wulfstan to trace the coast of
Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual
mission carried Peter’s-pence to Rome. But it
was with the Franks that his intercourse was
closest, and it was from them that he drew the
scholars to aid him in his work of education.
Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over
his new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old
Saxon, was fetched it may be from the Westphalian

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abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that
Ælfred’s gratitude for his deliverance from the
Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. The
real work however to be done was done, not by
these teachers but by the King himself. Ælfred
established a school for the young nobles at his
own court, and it was to the need of books for
these scholars in their own tongue that we owe
his most remarkable literary effort. He took his
books as he found them–they were the popular
manuals of his age–the Consolation of Boethius,
the Pastoral Book of Pope Gregory, the compilation
of “Orosius,” then the one accessible handbook
of universal history, and the history of his own
people by Bæda. He translated these works into
English, but he was far more than a translator, he
was an editor for his people. Here he omitted,
there he expanded. He enriched “Orosius” by a
sketch of the new geographical discoveries in
the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his
selections from Bæda. In one place he stops to
explain his theory of government, his wish for
a thicker population, his conception of national
welfare as consisting in a due balance of the priest,
the thegn, and the churl. The mention of Nero
spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power.
The cold Providence of Boethius gives way to an
enthusiastic acknowledgement of the goodness of
God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature
flings off its royal mantle, and he talks as a man

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to men. “Do not blame me,” he prays with a
charming simplicity, “if any know Latin better
than I, for every man must say what he says
and do what he does according to his ability.”
But simple as was his aim, Ælfred changed the
whole front of our literature. Before him,
England possessed in her own tongue one great
poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs.
Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the
prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
translations of Ælfred, and above all with the
chronicle of his reign. It seems likely that the
King’s rendering of Bæda’s history gave the first
impulse towards the compilation of what is known
as the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which
was certainly thrown into its present form during
his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of
Wessex and the bishops of Winchester, which
had been preserved from older times, were
roughly expanded into a national history by
insertions from Bæda: but it is when it reaches
the reign of Ælfred that the chronicle suddenly
widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and
originality, that marks the gift of a new power to
the English tongue. Varying as it does from age
to age in historic value, it remains the first
vernacular history of any Teutonic people, and
save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors
among his Gothic people, the earliest and
most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.

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But all this literary activity was only a part
of that general upbuilding of Wessex by which
Ælfred was preparing for a fresh contest with the
stranger. He knew that the actual winning back
of the Danelaw must be a work of the sword,
and through these long years of peace he was
busy with the creation of such a force as might
match that of the northmen. A fleet grew out
of the little squadron which Ælfred had been
forced to man with Frisian seamen. The national
fyrd or levy of all freemen at the King’s call was
reorganized. It was now divided into two halves,
one of which served in the field while the other
guarded its own burhs and townships and served
to relieve its fellow when the men’s forty days of
service were ended. A more disciplined military
force was provided by subjecting all owners of
five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which
recognized the change that had now substituted
the thegn for the eorl and in which we see the
beginning of a feudal system. How effective
these measures were was seen when the new
resistance they met on the Continent drove the
northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893
a large fleet steered for the Andredsweald, while
the sea-king Hasting entered the Thames. Ælfred
held both at bay through the year till the men of
the Danelaw rose at their comrades’ call. Wessex
stood again front to front with the northmen.
But the King’s measures had made the realm

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strong enough to set aside its old policy of defence
for one of vigorous attack. His son
Eadward and his son-in-law Æthelred, whom he
had set as Ealdorman over what remained of
Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active
as the King. The aim of the northmen was to
rouse again the hostility of the Welsh, but while
Ælfred held Exeter against their fleet, Eadward
and Æthelred caught their army near the Severn
and overthrew it with a vast slaughter at Buttington.
The destruction of their camp on the
Lea by the united English forces ended the war;
in 897 Hasting again withdrew across the Channel,
and the Danelaw made peace. It was with the
peace he had won still about him that Ælfred died
in 901, and warrior as his son Eadward had shown
himself, he clung to his father’s policy of rest.
It was not till 910 that a fresh rising of the
northmen forced Ælfred’s children to gird themselves
to the conquest of the Danelaw.

Eadward the Elder

While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister
Æthelflæd, in whose hands Æthelred’s death left
English Mercia, attacked the “Five Boroughs,” a
rude confederacy which had taken the place of
the older Mercian kingdom. Derby represented
the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln
the Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English,
Stamford the province of the Gyrwas, Nottingham
probably that of the Southumbrians. Each
of these “Five Boroughs” seems to have been

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ruled by its earl with his separate “host”; within
each twelve “lawmen” administered Danish law,
while a common “Thing” may have existed for the
whole district. In her attack on this powerful
league Æthelflæd abandoned the older strategy of
battle and raid for that of siege and fortress-building.
Advancing along the line of Trent, she
fortified Tamworth and Stafford on its head-waters;
when a rising in Gwent called her back to the
Welsh border, her army stormed Brecknock; and
its king no sooner fled for shelter to the northmen
in whose aid he had risen than Æthelflæd at
once closed on Derby. Raids from Middle-England
failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her
prey; and Derby was hardly her own when,
turning southward, she forced the surrender of
Leicester. Nor had the brilliancy of his sister’s
exploits eclipsed those of the King, for the son
of Ælfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he
had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the northmen
from France, summoned no doubt by the cry of
distress from their brethren in England, and had
bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection
of forts at Hertford and Witham. On the death
of Æthelflæd in 918 he came boldly to the front.
Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering
the whole strength of the kingdom into his single
hand, he undertook the systematic reduction of
the Danelaw. South of the Middle-English and
the Fens lay a tract watered by the Ouse and the

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Nen–originally the district of a tribe known as
the South-English, and now, like the Five
Boroughs of the north, grouped round the towns
of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The
reduction of these was followed by that of East-Anglia;
the northmen of the Fens submitted
with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham.
Eadward’s Mercian troops had already
seized Manchester; he himself was preparing to
complete his conquests, when in 924 the whole
of the North suddenly laid itself at his feet.
Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the
Britons of Strathclyde “chose him to father and
lord.”

Æthelstan

The triumph was his last. Eadward died in
925, but the reign of his son Æthelstan, Ælfred’s
golden-haired grandson whom the King had girded
as a child with a sword set in a golden scabbard
and a gem-studded belt, proved even more glorious
than his own. In spite of its submission the
North had still to be won. Dread of the northmen
had drawn Scot and Cumbrian to their
acknowledgement of Eadward’s overlordship, but
Æthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria
with his dominions than dread of Wessex took
the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot
King Constantine organized a league of Scot,
Cumbrian, and Welshman with the northmen.
The league was broken by Æthelstan’s rapid
action in 926; the North-Welsh were forced to

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pay annual tribute, to march in his armies, and
to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall
were reduced to a like vassalage, and
finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
till then with its English inhabitants, But eight
years later the same league called Æthelstan
again to the North; and though Constantine was
punished by an army which wasted his kingdom
while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness the
English army had no sooner withdrawn than
Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a
fleet of pirates from Ireland under the sea-king
Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
beside the northmen against the West-Saxon
King; but his victory at Brunanburh crushed
the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession
in 940, and the North again rose in revolt. The
men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a
peace which left him king but south of the
Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting
again laid the Danelaw at his feet.

Dunstan

But policy was now to supplement the work
of the sword. The completion of the West-Saxon
realm was in fact reserved for the hands,
not of a king or warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan
stands first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen
who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey
and ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable

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in himself, in his own vivid personality after
eight centuries of revolution and change. He
was born in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the
home of his father, Heorstan, a man of wealth
and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester.
It must have been in his father’s hall
that the fair, diminutive boy, with scant but
beautiful hair, caught his love for “the vain
songs of heathendom, the trifling legends, the
funeral chaunts,” which afterwards roused against
him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might
have derived his passionate love of music, and his
custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey
or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left
their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as
they left them along the Rhine and the Danube;
and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred
and profane letters till his brain broke down in
delirium. So famous became his knowledge in the
neighbourhood that news of it reached the court
of Æthelstan, but his appearance there was the
signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers.
Again they drove him from Eadmund’s train,
threw him from his horse as he passed through
the marshes, and with the wild passion of their
age trampled him under foot in the mire. The
outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from
his sick-bed a monk. But the monastic profession
was then little more than a vow of celibacy and
his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in

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fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; full of strong
affections, and capable of inspiring others with
affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious
memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and
genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was
at the same time an indefatigable worker alike
at books or handicraft. As his sphere began
to widen we see him followed by a train of
pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping,
painting, designing. One morning a lady summons
him to her house to design a robe which
she is embroidering, and as he bends with her
maidens over their toil his harp hung upon the
wall sounds without mortal touch tones which the
excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.

Conquest of the Danelaw

From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to
a wider sphere of activity towards the close of
Eadmund’s reign. But the old jealousies revived
at his reappearance at court, and counting the game
lost Dunstan prepared again to withdraw. The
king had spent the day in the chase; the red
deer which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar
cliffs, and his horse only checked itself on the
brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund
in the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice
to Dunstan. He was at once summoned
on the king’s return. “Saddle your horse,” said
Eadmund, “and ride with me.” The royal train
swept over the marshes to his home; and the
king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated

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him in the abbot’s chair as Abbot of Glastonbury.
Dunstan became one of Eadmund’s councillors,
and his hand was seen in the settlement of the
north. It was the hostility of the states around
it to the West-Saxon rule which had roused so
often revolt in the Danelaw; but from the time of
Brunanburh we hear nothing more of the hostility
of Bernicia, while Cumbria was conquered by
Eadmund and turned adroitly to account in winning
over the Scots to his cause. The greater part of it
was granted to their king Malcolm on terms that
he should be Eadmund’s “fellow-worker by sea and
land.” The league of Scot and Briton was thus
finally broken up, and the fidelity of the Scots
secured by their need of help in holding down
their former ally. The settlement was soon
troubled by the young king’s death. As he
feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946,
Leofa, a robber whom Eadmund had banished
from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at
the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer
when he bade him retire. The king sprang in
wrath to his thegn’s aid, and seizing Leofa by the
hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle
the robber drove his dagger to Eadmund’s heart.
His death at once stirred fresh troubles in the
north; the Danelaw rose against his brother and
successor, Eadred, and some years of hard fighting
were needed before it was again driven to own the
English supremacy. But with its submission in

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954 the work of conquest was done. Dogged as
his fight had been, the Dane at last owned
himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred’s
final triumph all resistance came to an end. The
Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.
North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire
might again cross swords with men of Hampshire;
but their strife was henceforth a local strife
between men of the same people; it was a strife of
Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of Englishmen
with Northmen.

Absorption of the Northmen

The fierceness of the northman’s onset had hidden
the real character of his attack. To the men who
first fronted the pirates it seemed as though the
story of the world had gone back to the days
when the German barbarians first broke in upon
the civilized world. It was so above all in
Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen’s
own attack on the island was seen in the
northmen’s attack on it. Boats of marauders from
the northern seas again swarmed off the British
coast; church and town were again the special
object of attack; the invaders again settled on the
conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger
than the faith of Christ. But the issues of the
two attacks showed the mighty difference between
them. When the English ceased from their onset
upon Roman Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared,
and a new people of conquerors stood

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alone on the conquered land. The Northern
storm on the other hand left land, people,
government unchanged. England remained a
country of Englishmen. The conquerors sank
into the mass of the conquered, and Woden yielded
without a struggle to Christ. The strife
between Briton and Englishman was in fact a
strife between men of different races, while the
strife between northman and Englishman was a
strife between men whose race was the same. The
followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts,
its culture, its wealth, as they were strange to the
social degradation which Rome had brought on its
province. But the northman was little more than
an Englishman bringing back to an England which
had drifted far from its origin the barbaric life
of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere
else were the fighters men of one blood and one
speech. But just for this reason the union of the
combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete.
The victory of the house of Ælfred only
hastened a process of fusion which was already
going on. From the first moment of his settlement
in the Danelaw the northman had been
passing into an Englishman. The settlers were
few; they were scattered among a large population;
in tongue, in manner, in institutions there
was little to distinguish them from the men among

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whom they dwelt. Moreover their national temper
helped on the process of assimilation. Even in
France, where difference of language and difference
of custom seemed to interpose an impassable
barrier between the northman settled in Normandy
and his neighbours, he was fast becoming
a Frenchman. In England, where no such barriers
existed, the assimilation was even quicker. The
two peoples soon became confounded. In a few
years a northman in blood was Archbishop of
Canterbury and another northman in blood was
Archbishop of York.

The three Northern Kingdoms

The fusion might have been delayed if not
wholly averted by continued descents from the
Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred’s reign
the long attack which the northman had directed
against western Christendom came, for a while at
least, to an end. On the world which it assailed
its results had been immense. It had utterly
changed the face of the west. The empire of
Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had
been alike dashed to pieces. But break and
change as it might, Christendom had held the
northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power
which had grown up on the western seas had
disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the northman’s
rule had dwindled to the holding of a few
coast towns. In France his settlements had
shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In
England every northman was a subject of the

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English King. Even the empire of the seas
had passed from the sea-kings’ hands. It was
an English and not a Scandinavian fleet that for
fifty years to come held mastery in the English
and the Irish Channels. With Eadred’s victory
in fact the struggle seemed to have reached its
close. Stray pirate boats still hung off headland
and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide
to gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century
to come no great pirate fleet made its way to the
west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed
through these years in the political changes of
Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from
fiord and dale from dale was breaking down.
The little commonwealths which had held so
jealously aloof from each other were being drawn
together whether they would or no. In each of
the three regions of the north great kingdoms
were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made
himself lord of the petty states about him. In
Denmark King Gorm built up in the same way
a monarchy of the Danes. Norway itself was
the first to become a single monarchy. Legend
told how one of its many rulers, Harald of
Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of
Hordaland, a girl he had chosen for wife, and how
Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his
petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald
vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he had

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made all Norway his own. So every springtide
came war and hosting, harrying and burning, till
a great fight at Hafursfiord settled the matter, and
Harald “Ugly-Head,” as men called him while the
strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again
and became Harald “Fair-Hair.” The Northmen
loved no master, and a great multitude fled out of
the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and
colonizing it, some swarming to the Orkneys and
Hebrides till Harald harried them out again and
the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum’s
host in the Rhine country or follow Hrolf to his
fights on the Seine. But little by little the land
settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian
realms gathered strength for new efforts
which were to leave their mark on our after
history.

England and its King

But of the new danger which threatened it in
this union of the north England knew little. The
storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and
the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless
conflict into a time of peace. Here as elsewhere
the northman had failed in his purpose of conquest;
but here as elsewhere he had done a
mighty work. In shattering the empire of Charles
the Great he had given birth to the nations of
modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen
he had created an English people. The
national union which had been brought about
for a moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a

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union of sheer force which broke down at the first
blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of the
northmen were so many wedges that split up the
fabric of the roughly-built realm. But the very
agency which destroyed the new England was
destined to bring it back again, and to breathe
into it a life that made its union real. The
peoples who had so long looked on each other as
enemies found themselves fronted by a common
foe. They were thrown together by a common
danger and the need of a common defence. Their
common faith grew into a national bond as religion
struggled hand in hand with England itself against
the heathen of the north. They recognized a
common king as a common struggle changed
Ælfred and his sons from mere leaders of West-Saxons
into leaders of all Englishmen in their
fight with the stranger. And when the work
which Ælfred set his house to do was done, when
the yoke of the northman was lifted from the
last of his conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian
and Mercian, spent with the battle for a
common freedom and a common country, knew
themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an
English people.

The new people found its centre in the King.
The heightening of the royal power was a direct
outcome of the war. The dying out of other
royal stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line
of hereditary kingship. But it was the war with

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the northmen that raised Ælfred and his sons
from tribal leaders into national kings. The long
series of triumphs which wrested the land from the
stranger begot a new and universal loyalty; while
the wider dominion which their success bequeathed
removed the kings further and further from their
people, lifted them higher and higher above the
nobles, and clothed them more and more with
a mysterious dignity. Above all the religious
character of the war against the northmen gave
a religious character to the sovereigns who waged
it. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the
son of Woden, became yet more sacred as “the
Lord’s Anointed.” By the very fact of his consecration
he was pledged to a religious rule, to
justice, mercy, and good government; but his
“hallowing” invested him also with a power
drawn not from the will of man or the assent of
his subjects but from the will of God, and treason
against him became the worst of crimes. Every
reign lifted the sovereign higher in the social
scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with him
in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman.
The ealdorman himself, once the hereditary
ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate
of the national king, with an authority curtailed
in every shire by that of the royal shire-reeves,
officers charged with levying the royal revenues and
destined ultimately to absorb judicial authority.
Among the later nobility of the thegns personal

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service with such a lord was held not to degrade
but to ennoble. “Horse-thegn,” and “cup-thegn,”
and “border,” the constable, butler, and treasurer,
found themselves officers of state; and the developement
of politics, the wider extension of home
and foreign affairs were already transforming these
royal officers into a standing council or ministry
for the transaction of the ordinary administrative
business and the reception of judicial appeals.
Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates
nominated by the king, and constituting in itself
a large part of the Witenagemot when that
assembly was gathered for legislative purposes,
drew the actual control of affairs more and more
into the hands of the sovereign himself.

Growth of Feudalism

But the king’s power was still a personal power.
He had to be everywhere and to see for himself
that everything he willed was done. The royal
claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of
the Crown. There was a want of administrative
machinery in actual connexion with the government,
responsible to it, drawing its force directly
from it, and working automatically in its name
even in moments when the royal power was itself
weak or wavering. The Crown was strong under
a king who was strong, whose personal action was
felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose
dread lay on every reeve and ealdorman. But
with a weak king the Crown was weak. Ealdor-men,
provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions,

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ceased to move at the royal bidding the
moment the direct royal pressure was loosened
or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old
provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance
and isolation lingered on and woke afresh
when the crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a
child. And at the moment we have reached the
royal power and the national union it embodied
had to battle with fresh tendencies towards
national disintegration which sprang like itself
from the struggle with the northman. The tendency
towards personal dependence and towards a
social organization based on personal dependence
received an overpowering impulse from the strife.
The long insecurity of a century of warfare drove
the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to seek protection
more and more from the thegn beside him.
The freeman “commended” himself to a lord who
promised aid, and as the price of this shelter he
surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a
fief laden with conditions of military service.
The principle of personal allegiance which was
embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself
tended to widen into a theory of general dependence.
From Ælfred’s day it was assumed that no
man could exist without a lord. The “lordless
man” became a sort of outlaw in the realm. The
free man, the very base of the older English constitution,
died down more and more into the
“villein,” the man who did suit and service to a

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master, who followed him to the field, who looked
to his court for justice, who rendered days of
service in his demesne. The same tendencies
drew the lesser thegns around the greater nobles,
and these around the provincial ealdormen. The
ealdormen had hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants
of the national sovereign before they again
began to rise into petty kings, and in the century
which follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian
thegns following a Mercian or Northumbrian
ealdorman to the field though it were against the
lord of the land. Even the constitutional forms
which sprang from the old English freedom
tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding
power. In the “great meeting” of the
Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
rule of the realm. It represented the whole
English people, as the wise-moots of each kingdom
represented the separate peoples of each; and its
powers were as supreme in the wider field as
theirs in the narrower. It could elect or depose
the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the
imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion
of treaties, the control of wars, the disposal
of public lands, the appointment of great officers
of state. But such a meeting necessarily differed
greatly in constitution from the Witan of the
lesser kingdoms. The individual freeman, save
when the host was gathered together, could hardly
take part in its deliberations. The only relic of

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its popular character lay at last in the ring of
citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at
London or Winchester, and shouted their “aye”
or “nay” at the election of a king. Distance and
the hardships of travel made the presence of the
lesser thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and
the national council practically shrank into a
gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and the
officers of the crown.

Feudalism and the Monarchy

The old English democracy had thus all but
passed into an oligarchy of the narrowest kind.
The feudal movement which in other lands was
breaking up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit
states with nobles at their head who owned
little save a nominal allegiance to their king
threatened to break up England itself. What
hindered its triumph was the power of the Crown,
and it is the story of this struggle between the
monarchy and these tendencies to feudal isolation
which fills the period between the death of Eadred
and the conquest of the Norman. It was a
struggle which England shared with the rest of
the western world, but its issue here was a peculiar
one. In other countries feudalism won an easy
victory over the central government. In England
alone the monarchy was strong enough to hold
feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might be, the
English ealdorman never succeeded in becoming
really hereditary or independent of the Crown.
Kings as weak as Æthelred could drive ealdormen

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into exile and could replace them by fresh nominees.
If the Witenagemot enabled the great
nobles to bring their power to bear directly on
the Crown, it preserved at any rate a feeling of
national unity and was forced to back the Crown
against individual revolt. The Church too never
became feudalized. The bishop clung to the
Crown, and the bishop remained a great social
and political power. As local in area as the
ealdorman, for the province was his diocese and
he sat by his side in the local Witenagemot, he
furnished a standing check on the independence
of the great nobles. But if feudalism proved too
weak to conquer the monarchy, it was strong
enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the
two forces could master the other, but each could
weaken the other, and throughout the whole
period of their conflict England lay a prey to
disorder within and to insult from without.

The first sign of these troubles was seen when
the death of Eadred in 955 handed over the realm
to a child king, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig
was swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu;
and the quarrel between her and the older
counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the
coronation feast. On the young king’s insolent
withdrawal to her chamber Dunstan, at the bidding
of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat.
But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence
of outlawry drove the abbot over sea, while the

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triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the
marriage of her daughter to the king and the
spoliation of the monasteries which Dunstan had
befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig’s
kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded
his marriage as incestuous, and it was
followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958
Archbishop Odo parted the King from his wife
by solemn sentence; while the Mercians and
Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig’s
brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan.
The death of Eadwig a few months later restored
the unity of the realm; but his successor Eadgar
was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his
reign the direction of affairs must have lain in the
hands of Dunstan, whose elevation to the see of
Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as
of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies
in the silence of our chroniclers. His work indeed
was a work of settlement, and such a work was
best done by the simple enforcement of peace.
During the years of rest in which King and
Primate enforced justice and order northman
and Englishman drew together into a single
people. Their union was the result of no direct
policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan’s policy
preserved to the conquered Danelaw its local
rights and local usages. But he recognized the
men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed
northmen in the royal service, and promoted

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them to high posts in Church and State. For the
rest he trusted to time, and time justified his
trust. The fusion was marked by a memorable
change in the name of the land. Slowly as the
conquering tribes had learned to know themselves,
by the one national name of Englishmen, they
learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on
the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar’s
day that the name of Britain passed into the
name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen,
England. The same vigorous rule which secured
rest for the country during these years of national
union told on the growth of material prosperity.
Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its extension
is seen in the complaint that men learned fierceness
from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.
The laws of Æthelred which provide for the protection
and regulation of foreign trade only recognize
a state of things which grew up under
Eadgar. “Men of the Empire,” traders of Lower
Lorraine and the Rhine-land, “Men of Rouen,”
traders from the new Norman duchy of the Seine,
were seen in the streets of London. It was in
Eadgar’s day indeed that London rose to the
commercial greatness it has held ever since.

Eadward the Martyr

Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he
was still in the prime of manhood when he died
in 975. His death gave a fresh opening to the
great nobles. He had bequeathed the crown to

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his elder son Eadward; but the ealdorman of
East-Anglia, Æthelwine, rose at once to set a
younger child, Æthelred, on the throne. But the
two primates of Canterbury and York who had
joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar
now joined in setting it on the head of Eadward,
and Dunstan remained as before master of the
realm. The boy’s reign however was troubled
by strife between the monastic party and their
opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short
by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of
Æthelred, the power of Dunstan made way for
that of ealdorman Æthelwine and the queen-mother.
Some years of tranquillity followed this
victory; but though Æthelwine preserved order
at home he showed little sense of the danger
which threatened from abroad. The North was
girding itself for a fresh, onset on England. The
Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into
their kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway;
and it was no longer in isolated bands but
in national hosts that they were about to seek
conquests in the South. As Æthelred drew to
manhood some chance descents on the coast told
of this fresh stir in the North, and the usual
result of the northman’s presence was seen in
new risings among the Welsh.

Æthelred

In 991 ealdorman Brihtnoth of East-Anglia
fell in battle with a Norwegian force at Maldon,
and the withdrawal of the pirates had to be

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bought by money. Æthelwine too died at this
moment, and the death of the two ealdormen left
Æthelred free to act as King. But his aim was
rather to save the Crown from his nobles than
England from the northmen. Handsome and
pleasant of address, the young King’s pride showed
itself in a string of imperial titles, and his restless
and self-confident temper drove him to push the
pretensions of the Crown to their furthest extent.
His aim throughout his reign was to free himself
from the dictation of the great nobles, and it was
his indifference to their “rede” or counsel that
won him the name of “Æthelred the Redeless.”
From the first he struck boldly at his foes, and
Ælfric, the ealdorman of Central Wessex, whom the
death of his rival Æthelwine left supreme in the
realm, was driven possibly by fear to desert to
a Danish force which he was sent in 992 to drive
from the coast. Æthelred turned from his triumph
at home to meet the forces of the Danish and
Norwegian kings, Swein and Olaf, which
anchored off London in 994. His policy through-out
was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for
intrigues which parted the invaders till troubles
at home drew both again to the North. Æthelrod
took quick advantage of his success at home
and abroad; the place of the great ealdormen in
the royal councils was taken by court-thegns, in
whom we see the rudiments of a ministry, while

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the king’s fleet attacked the pirates’ haunts in
Cumberland and the Cotentin. But in spite of
all this activity the news of a fresh invasion found
England more weak and broken than ever. The
rise of the “new men” only widened the breach
between the court and the great nobles, and their
resentment showed itself in delays which foiled
every attempt of Æthelred to meet the pirate-bands
who still clung to the coast.

Swein

They came probably from the other side of the
Channel, and it was to clear them away as well
as secure himself against Swein’s threatened
descent that Æthelred took a step which brought
England in contact with a land over-sea. Normandy,
where the northmen had settled a hundred
years before, was now growing into a great power,
and it was to win the friendship of Normandy
and to close its harbours against Swein that
Æthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke’s
daughter, Emma, to wife. The same dread of
invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the
northern mercenaries whom the king had drawn
to settle in the land as a fighting force against
their brethren; and an order of Æthelred brought
about a general massacre of them on St. Brice’s
day. Wedding and murder however proved
feeble defences against Swein. His fleet reached
the coast in 1003, and for four years he marched
through the length and breadth of southern and
eastern England, “lighting his war-beacons as he

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went” in blazing homestead and town. Then for
a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare for a later
and more terrible onset. But there was no rest
for the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian
jarls took his place, and from Wessex the war
extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012
Canterbury was taken and sacked, Æltheah the
Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there in
default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set
him in the midst of their husting, pelting him
with bones and skulls of oxen, till one more
pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe.
Meanwhile the court was torn with intrigue and
strife, with quarrels between the court-thegns in
their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels
between these favourites and the nobles whom
they superseded in the royal councils. The
King’s policy of finding aid among his new
ministers broke down when these became themselves
ealdormen. With their local position they
took up the feudal claims of independence; and
Eadric, whom Æthelred raised to be ealdorman
of Mercia, became a power that overawed the
Crown. In this paralysis of the central authority
all organization and union was lost. “Shire
would not help other” when Swein returned in
1013. The war was terrible but short. Everywhere
the country was pitilessly harried, churches
plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one
exception of London, there was no attempt at

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resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung open
their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to
the northmen at Bath. Even London was forced
at last to give way, and Æthelred fled over-sea to
a refuge in Normandy.

Cnut

He was soon called back again. In the opening
of 1014 Swein died suddenly at Gainsborough;
and the spell of terror was broken. The Witan
recalled “their own born lord,” and Æthelred
returned to see the Danish fleet under Swein’s
son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to
plan a more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as
he was, Cnut showed from the first the vigour of
his temper. Setting aside his brother he made
himself king of Denmark; and at once gathered
a splendid fleet for a fresh attack on England,
whose king and nobles were again at strife, and
where a bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric
of Mercia and Æthelred’s son Eadmund Ironside
broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of
Eadric to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the
coast threw open England to his arms; Wessex
and Mercia submitted to him; and though the
loyalty of London enabled Eadmund, when his
father’s death raised him in 1016 to the throne, to
struggle bravely for a few months against the
Danes, a decisive overthrow at Assandun and a
treaty of partition which this wrested from him at
Olney were soon followed by the young king’s
death. Cnut was left master of the realm. His

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first acts of government showed little but the
temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst
for blood. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given
him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the
king’s signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the
brother of Eadmund Ironside, while the children
of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this
the young conqueror rose abruptly into a wise and
temperate king. His aim during twenty years
seems to have been to obliterate from men’s minds
the foreign character of his rule and the bloodshed
in which it had begun.

Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no
foreigner in the sense that the Norman was a
foreigner after him. His language differed little
from the English tongue. He brought in no new
system of tenure or government. Cnut ruled in
fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native
king. He dismissed his Danish host, and retaining
only a trained band of household troops or
“hus-carls” to serve as a body-guard relied boldly
for support within his realm on the justice and
good government he secured it. He fell back on
“Eadgar’s Law,” on the old constitution of the
realm, for his rule of government; and owned no
difference between Dane and Englishman among
his subjects. He identified himself even with the
patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The

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Church had been the centre of the national resistance;
Archbishop Ælfheah had been slain by
Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of
the Church; he translated Ælfheah’s body with
great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his
father’s ravages by gifts to the religious houses;
he protected English pilgrims even against the
robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks
broke out in a song which he composed as he
listened to their chaunt at Ely. “Merrily sang
the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by”
across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their
abbey. “Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear
we these monks sing.” A letter which Cnut wrote
after twelve years of rule to his English subjects
marks the grandeur of his character and the noble
conception he had formed of kingship. “I have
vowed to God to lead a right life in all things,”
wrote the king, “to rule justly and piously my
realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement
to all. If heretofore I have done aught beyond
what was just, through headiness or negligence of
youth, I am ready, with God’s help, to amend it
utterly.” No royal officer, either for fear of the
king or for favour of any, is to consent to injustice,
none is to do wrong to rich or poor “as they
would value my friendship and their own well-being.”
He especially denounces unfair exactions:
“I have no need that money be heaped together
for me by unjust demands.” “I have sent this

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letter before me,” Cnut ends, “that all the people
of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for as
you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will
I spare, to spend myself and my toil in what is
needful and good for my people.”

Cnut and Scotland

Cnut’s greatest gift to his people was that of
peace. With him began the long internal tranquillity
which was from this time to be the keynote
of the national history. Without, the Dane
was no longer a terror; on the contrary it was
English ships and English soldiers who now
appeared in the North and followed Cnut in his
campaigns against Wend or Norwegian. Within,
the exhaustion which follows a long anarchy gave
fresh strength to the Crown, and Cnut’s own
ruling temper was backed by the force of hus-carls
at his disposal. The four Earls of Northumberland,
Mercia, Wessex, and East-Anglia, whom
he set in the place of the older caldormen, knew
themselves to be the creatures of his will; the
ablest indeed of their number, Godwine, earl of
Wessex, was the minister or close counsellor of the
King. The troubles along the Northern border
were ended by a memorable act of policy. From
Eadgar’s day the Scots had pressed further and
further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of
their king Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham
in 1018 made him master of Northern Northumbria.
In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the
quarrel ended in a formal cession of the district

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between the Forth and the Tweed, Lothian as it
was called, to the Scot-king on his doing homage
to Cnut. The gain told at once on the character
of the Northern kingdom. The kings of the Scots
had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and
Celtic peoples; but from the moment that Lothian
with its English farmers and English seamen
became a part of their dominions it became the
most important part. The kings fixed their seat
at Edinburgh, and in the midst of an English
population passed from Gaelic chieftains into the
Saxon rulers of a mingled people.

Cnut’s Sons

But the greatness of Cnut’s rule hung solely on
the greatness of his temper, and the Danish power
was shaken by his death in 1035. The empire he
had built up at once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed
both England and Denmark to his son
Harthacnut; but the boy’s absence enabled his
brother, Harald Harefoot, to acquire all England
save Godwine’s earldom of Wessex, and in the end
even Godwine was forced to submit to him.
Harald’s death in 1040 averted a conflict between
the brothers, and placed Harthacnut quietly on
the throne. But the love which Cnut’s justice
had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness
of his successors. The long peace sickened men of
their bloodshed and violence. “Never was a
bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes
came,” ran a popular song, when Harald’s men
seized Ælfred, a brother of Eadmund Ironside,

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who returned to England from Normandy where
he had found a refuge since his father’s flight to
its shores. Every tenth man among his followers
was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and Ælfred’s
eyes torn out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage
than his predecessor, dug up his brother’s body
and flung it into a marsh; while a rising at
Worcester against his hus-carls was punished by
the burning of the town and the pillage of the
shire. The young king’s death was no less brutal
than his life; in 1042 “he died as he stood at his
drink in the house of Osgod Clapa at Lambeth.”
England wearied of rulers such as these: but their
crimes helped her to free herself from the impossible
dream of Cnut. The North, still more
barbarous than herself, could give her no new
element of progress or civilization. It was the
consciousness of this and a hatred of rulers such
as Harald and Harthacnut which co-operated with
the old feeling of reverence for the past in calling
back the line of Ælfred to the throne.

Eadward the Confessor

It is in such transitional moments of a nation’s
history that it needs the cool prudence, the sensitive
selfishness, the quick perception of what is
possible, which distinguished the adroit politician
whom the death of Cnut left supreme in England.
Originally of obscure origin, Godwine’s ability had
raised him high in the royal favour; he was allied
to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with the
earldom of Wessex, and at last made the Viceroy

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or justiciar of the King in the government of the
realm. In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown
courage and skill at the head of a body of English
troops, but his true field of action lay at home.
Shrewd, eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine
united vigilance, industry, and caution with
a singular dexterity in the management of men.
During the troubled years that followed the death
of Cnut he did his best to continue his master’s
policy in securing the internal union of England
under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her
connexion with the North. But at the death of
Harthacnut Cnut’s policy had become impossible,
and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
with the tide of popular feeling which called
Eadward, the one living son of Æthelred, to the
throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in
exile at the court of Normandy. A halo of
tenderness spread in after-time round this last
king of the old English stock; legends told of his
pious simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of
mood, the holiness that gained him his name of
“Confessor” and enshrined him as a saint in his
abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in
manlier tones of the long peace and glories of his
reign, how warriors and wise counsellors stood
round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton
obeyed him. His was the one figure that stood
out bright against the darkness when England lay
trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and

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so dear became his memory that liberty and independence
itself seemed incarnate in his name.
Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or
Henry called for the “good laws of Eadward the
Confessor.” But it was as a mere shadow of the
past that the exile really returned to the throne
of Ælfred; there was something shadow-like in
his thin form, his delicate complexion, his transparent
womanly hands; and it is almost as a
shadow that he glides over the political stage.
The work of government was done by sterner
hands.

Godwine

Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England
lay in the hands of its three Earls, Siward of
Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of
Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency
to provincial separation against which Æthelred
had struggled was to triumph with the death of
Cnut. What hindered this severance was the
greed of Godwine. Siward was isolated in the
North: Leofric’s earldom was but a fragment of
Mercia. But the Earl of Wessex, already master
of the wealthiest part of England, seized district
after district for his house. His son Swein
secured an earldom in the south-west; his son
Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his nephew
Beorn was established in Central England: while
the marriage of his daughter Eadgyth to the king
himself gave Godwine a hold upon the throne.
Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim

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at winning England itself than at breaking up
England to win a mere fief in it. But his aim
found a sudden check through the lawlessness of
his son Swein. Swein seduced the abbess of
Leominster, sent her home again with a yet more
outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and
on the king’s refusal to grant it fled from the
realm. Godwine’s influence secured his pardon,
but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered
his cousin Beorn who had opposed the reconciliation
and again fled to Flanders. A storm of
national indignation followed him over-sea. The
meeting of the Wise men branded him as
“nithing,” the “utterly worthless,” yet in a year
his father wrested a new pardon from the King
and restored him to his earldom. The scandalous
inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in
a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself.
The king was a stranger in his realm, and
his sympathies lay naturally with the home and
friends of his youth and exile. He spoke the
Norman tongue. He used in Norman fashion a
seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites
in the highest posts of Church and State.
Foreigners such as these, though hostile to the
minister, were powerless against Godwine’s influence
and ability, and when at a later time they
ventured to stand alone against him they fell
without a blow. But the general ill-will at
Swein’s inlawing enabled them to stir Eadward

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to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel
brought the opportunity of a decisive break with
him. On his return from a visit to the court
Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of the
king’s sister, demanded quarters for his train in
Dover. Strife arose, and many both of the
burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine’s
better nature withstood Eadward when the
king angrily bade him exact vengeance from the
town for the affront to his kinsman; and he
claimed a fair trial for the townsmen. But
Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and
the quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine
at once gathered his forces and marched upon
Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign
favourites. But even in a just quarrel the country
was cold in his support. The earls of Mercia and
Northumberland united their forces to those of
Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the
king to a gathering of the Witenagemot at
London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but
Swein’s outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of
Wessex, declining with his usual prudence a useless
struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders.

Harold

But the wrath of the nation was appeased by
his fall. Great as were Godwine’s faults, he was
the one man who now stood between England and
the rule of the strangers who flocked to the
Court; and a year had hardly passed when he
was strong enough to return. At the appearance

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of his fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was
once more forced to yield. The foreign prelates
and bishops fled over sea, outlawed by the same
meeting of the Wise men which restored Godwine
to his home. But he returned only to die, and
the direction of affairs passed quietly to his son
Harold. Harold came to power unfettered by the
obstacles which beset his father, and for twelve
years he was the actual governor of the realm.
The courage, the ability, the genius for administration,
the ambition and subtlety of Godwine were
found again in his son. In the internal government
of England he followed out his father’s
policy while avoiding its excesses. Peace was
preserved, justice administered, and the realm
increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work
and embroidery became famous in the markets of
Flanders and France. Disturbances from without
were crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold’s military
talents displayed themselves in a campaign
against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity
with which, arming his troops with weapons
adapted for mountain conflict, he penetrated to
the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country
to complete submission. With the gift of the
Northumbrian earldom on Siward’s death to his
brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of
Godwine, and as the waning health of the king,
the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who

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had returned from Hungary as his heir, and the
childhood of the Ætheling Eadgar who stood next
in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward
to the throne.

Normandy

But his advance was watched by one even more
able and ambitious than himself. For the last
half-century England had been drawing nearer to
the Norman land which fronted it across the
Channel. As we pass nowadays through Normandy,
it is English history which is round about
us. The name of hamlet after hamlet has memories
for English ears; a fragment of castle wall marks
the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves
the name of the Percy. The very look of the
country and its people seem familiar to us; the
Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
build and features of the small English farmer;
the fields about Caen, with their dense hedgerows,
their elms, their apple-orchards, are the very picture
of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift
themselves over the red-tiled roofs of little market
towns, the models of stately fabrics which superseded
the lowlier churches of Ælfred or Dunstan,
while the windy heights that look over orchard
and meadowland are crowned with the square grey
keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of
Richmond and the banks of Thames. It was
Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader like
Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from

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the French king, Charles the Simple, in 912, at
the moment when Ælfred’s children were beginning
their conquest of the English Danelaw. The
treaty of Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased
peace by this cession of the coast was a close imitation
of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
was baptized, received the king’s daughter in
marriage, and became his vassal for the territory
which now took the name of “the Northman’s
land” or Normandy. But vassalage and the new
faith sat lightly on the Dane. No such ties of
blood and speech tended to unite the northman
with the French among whom he settled along the
Seine as united him to the Englishmen among
whom he settled along the Humber. William
Longsword, the son of Hrolf, though wavering
towards France and Christianity, remained a northman
in heart; he called in a Danish colony to
occupy his conquest of the Cotentin, the peninsula
which runs out from St. Michael’s Mount to the
cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the
northmen of Bayeux where the Danish tongue and
fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk
of the Normans, with the child Duke Richard, fell
away for the time from Christianity, while new
pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. To the
close of the century the whole people were still
“Pirates” to the French around them, their land
the “Pirates’ land,” their Duke the “Pirates’

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Duke.” Yet in the end the same forces which
merged the Dane in the Englishman told even
more powerfully on the Dane in France. No race
has ever shown a greater power of absorbing all
the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom
they came in contact, or of infusing their own
energy into them. During the long reign of
Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William
Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996,
the heathen Norman pirates became French
Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse
language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local
names. As the old Northern freedom died silently
away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal
nobles and the “Pirates’ land” sank into the most
loyal of the fiefs of France.

Duke William

From the moment of their settlement on the
Frankish coast, the Normans had been jealously
watched by the English kings; and the anxiety of
Æthelred for their friendship set a Norman woman
on the English throne. The marriage of Emma
with Æthelred brought about a close political connexion
between the two countries. It was in
Normandy that the King found a refuge from
Swein’s invasion, and his younger boys grew up
in exile at the Norman court. Their presence
there drew the eyes of every Norman to the rich
land which offered so tempting a prey across the
Channel. The energy which they had shown in
winning their land from the Franks, in absorbing

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the French civilization and the French religion,
was now showing itself in adventures on far-off
shores, in crusades against the Moslem of Spain or
the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of adventure
that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against
England in Cnut’s day under pretext of setting
Æthelred’s children on its throne, but the wreck
of his fleet in a storm put an end to a project which
might have anticipated the work of his son. It
was that son, William the Great, as men of his
own day styled him, William the Conqueror as he
was to stamp himself by one event on English
history, who was now Duke of Normandy. The
full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and
patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which
lifts him out of the petty incidents of his age, were
as yet only partly disclosed. But there never had
been a moment from his boyhood when he was not
among the greatest of men. His life from the very
first was one long mastering of difficulty after
difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in
his name of “the Bastard.” His father Robert
had seen Arlotta, a tanner’s daughter of the town,
as she washed her linen in a little brook by Falaise;
and loving her he had made her the mother of his
boy. The departure of Robert on a pilgrimage
from which he never returned left William a child-ruler
among the most turbulent baronage in
Christendom; treason and anarchy surrounded
him as he grew to manhood; and disorder broke

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at last into open revolt. But in 1047 a fierce
combat of horse on the slopes of Val-ès-dunes
beside Caen left the young Duke master of his
duchy and he soon made his mastery felt. “Normans”
said a Norman poet “must be trodden down
and kept under foot, for he only that bridles them
may use them at his need.” In the stern order he
forced on the land Normandy from this hour felt
the bridle of its Duke.

William and France

Secure at home, William seized the moment of
Godwine’s exile to visit England, and received from
his cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards asserted,
a promise of succession to his throne. Such a
promise however, unconfirmed by the Witenagemot,
was valueless; and the return of Godwine
must have at once cut short the young Duke’s
hopes. He found in fact work enough to do in
his own duchy, for the discontent of his baronage
at the stern justice of his rule found support in the
jealousy which his power raised in the states around
him, and it was only after two great victories at
Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard
fighting that outer and inner foes were alike trodden
under foot. In 1060 William stood first among
the princes of France. Maine submitted to his
rule. Britanny was reduced to obedience by a
single march. While some of the rebel barons
rotted in the Duke’s dungeons and some were
driven into exile, the land settled down into a
peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth of

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wealth and culture. Learning and education found
their centre in the school of Bec, which the teaching
of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised in a few
years into the most famous school of Christendom.
Lanfranc’s first contact with William, if it showed
the Duke’s imperious temper, showed too his marvellous
insight into men. In a strife with the
Papacy which William provoked by his marriage
with Matilda, a daughter of the Count of Flanders,
Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition
was met by a sentence of banishment, and the
Prior had hardly set out on a lame horse, the only
one his house could afford, when he was overtaken
by the Duke, impatient that he should quit Normandy.
“Give me a better horse and I shall go
the quicker,” replied the imperturbable Lombard,
and William’s wrath passed into laughter and
good will. From that hour Lanfranc became his
minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in the
duchy itself or for the more daring schemes of
ambition which opened up across the Channel.

William and England

William’s hopes of the English crown are said
to have been revived by a storm which threw
Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the
coast of Ponthieu. Its count sold him to the
Duke; and as the price of return to England
William forced him to swear on the relics of saints
to support his claim to its throne. But, true or
no, the oath told little on Harold’s course. As
the childless King drew to his grave one obstacle

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after another was cleared from the earl’s path.
His brother Tostig had become his most dangerous
rival; but a revolt of the Northumbrians drove
Tostig to Flanders, and the earl was able to win
over the Mercian house of Leofric to his cause by
owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian Earl
Eadwine, as his brother’s successor. His aim was
in fact attained without a struggle. In the opening
of 1066 the nobles and bishops who gathered
round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly
from it to the election and coronation of Harold.
But at Eouen the news was welcomed with a burst
of furious passion, and the Duke of Normandy at
once prepared to enforce his claim by arms.
William did not claim the Crown. He claimed
simply the right which he afterwards used when
his sword had won it of presenting himself for
election by the nation, and he believed himself
entitled so to present himself by the direct commendation
of the Confessor. The actual election
of Harold which stood in his way, hurried as it
was, he did not recognize as valid. But with this
constitutional claim was inextricably mingled
resentment at the private wrong which Harold
had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance
on the man whom he regarded as untrue to his
oath. The difficulties in the way of his enterprise
were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no
support within England itself. At home he had
to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage;

1-161]

to gather a motley host from every quarter of
France and to keep it together for months; to
create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build,
to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time
amidst all this for the common business of government,
for negotiations with Denmark and the
Empire, with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with
Flanders and with Rome which had been estranged
from England by Archbishop Stigand’s acceptance
of his pallium from one who was not owned as a
canonical Pope.

Stamford Bridge

But his rival’s difficulties were hardly less than
his own. Harold was threatened with invasion
not only by William but by his brother Tostig,
who had taken refuge in Norway and secured the
aid of its king, Harald Hardrada. The fleet and
army he had gathered lay watching for months
along the coast. His one standing force was his
body of hus-carls, but their numbers only enabled
them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the
other hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of
fighting-men was a body easy to raise for any
single encounter but hard to keep together. To
assemble such a force was to bring labour to a
standstill. The men gathered under the King’s
standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their
fields. The ships were the fishing-vessels of the
coast. In September the task of holding them
together became impossible, but their dispersion
had hardly taken place when the two clouds which

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had so long been gathering burst at once upon the
realm. A change of wind released the landlocked
armament of William; but before changing, the
wind which prisoned the Duke brought the host
of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of
Yorkshire. The King hastened with his household
troops to the north and repulsed the
Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford
Bridge, but ere he could hurry back to London the
Norman host had crossed the sea and William,
who had anchored on the twenty-eighth of
September off Pevensey, was ravaging the coast
to bring his rival to an engagement. His merciless
ravages succeeded in drawing Harold from
London to the south; but the King wisely refused
to attack with the troops he had hastily summoned
to his banner. If he was forced to give battle,
he resolved to give it on ground he had himself
chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to
check William’s ravages he entrenched himself on
a hill known afterwards as that of Senlac, a low
spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His
position covered London and drove William to
concentrate his forces. With a host subsisting by
pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no alternative
was left to the Duke but a decisive victory
or ruin.

Battle of Hastings

On the fourteenth of October William led his
men at dawn along the higher ground that leads
from Hastings to the battle-field which Harold

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had chosen. From the mound of Telham the
Normans saw the host of the English gathered
thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on
the height of Senlac. Marshy ground covered
their right; on the left, the most exposed part of
the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold,
men in full armour and wielding huge axes, were
grouped round the Golden Dragon of Wessex and
the Standard of the King. The rest of the ground
was covered by thick masses of half-armed rustics
who had flocked at Harold’s summons to the fight
with the stranger. It was against the centre of
this formidable position that William arrayed his
Norman knighthood, while the mercenary forces
he had gathered in France and Britanny were
ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge of
the Norman foot opened the battle; in front rode
the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air
and catching it again while he chaunted the song
of Roland. He was the first of the host who
struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The
charge broke vainly on the stout stockade behind
which the English warriors plied axe and javelin
with fierce cries of “Out, out,” and the repulse of
the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse of
the Norman horse. Again and again the Duke
rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All
the fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman’s
blood, all the headlong valour that spurred him
over the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, mingled that day

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with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance,
the inexhaustible faculty of resource which shone
at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton troops,
entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke
in disorder, and as panic spread through the army
a cry arose that the Duke was slain. William tore
off his helmet; “I live,” he shouted, “and by
God’s help I will conquer yet.” Maddened by a
fresh repulse, the Duke spurred right at the
Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down
Gyrth, the King’s brother; again dismounted, a
blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
unmannerly rider who would not lend him his
steed. Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle
he turned the flight he had arrested into the means
of victory. Broken as the stockade was by his
desperate onset, the shield-wall of the warriors
behind it still held the Normans at bay till
William by a feint of flight drew a part of the
English force from their post of vantage. Turning
on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to
pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and
made himself master of the central ground. Meanwhile
the French and Bretons made good their
ascent on either flank. At three the hill seemed
won, at six the fight still raged around the Standard
where Harold’s hus-carls stood stubbornly at bay
on a spot marked afterwards by the high altar of
Battle Abbey. An order from the Duke at last
brought his archers to the front. Their arrow-flight

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told heavily on the dense masses crowded
around the King and as the sun went down a shaft
pierced Harold’s right eye. He fell between the
royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate
melly over his corpse.

Night covered the flight of the English army:
but William was quick to reap the advantage of
his victory. Securing Romney and Dover, he
marched by Canterbury upon London. Faction
and intrigue were doing his work for him as he
advanced; for Harold’s brothers had fallen with
the King on the field of Senlac, and there was
none of the house of Godwine to contest the
crown. Of the old royal line there remained but
a single boy, Eadgar the Ætheling. He was
chosen king; but the choice gave little strength
to the national cause. The widow of the
Confessor surrendered Winchester to the Duke.
The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission.
The citizens themselves faltered as
William, passing by their walls, gave Southwark
to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really
rested for support on the Earls of Mercia and
Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and William,
crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching
into Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from
their earldoms. The masterly movement forced
the Earls to hurry home, and London gave way at
once. Eadgar himself was at the head of the
deputation who came to offer the crown to the

1-166]

Norman Duke. “They bowed to him,” says the
English annalist pathetically, “for need.” They
bowed to the Norman as they had bowed to the
Dane, and William accepted the crown in the
spirit of Cnut. London indeed was secured by
the erection of a fortress which afterwards grew
into the Tower, but William desired to reign not
as a Conqueror but as a lawful king. At Christmas
he received the crown at Westminster from the
hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of “Yea,
Yea,” from his new English subjects. Fines from
the greater landowners atoned for a resistance
which now counted as rebellion; but with this
exception every measure of the new sovereign
showed his desire of ruling as a successor of
Eadward or Ælfred. As yet indeed the greater
part of England remained quietly aloof from him,
and he can hardly be said to have been recognized
as king by Northumberland or the greater part of
Mercia. But to the east of a line which stretched
from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was unquestioned,
and over this portion he ruled as an
English king. His soldiers were kept in strict
order. No change was made in law or custom.
The privileges of London were recognized by a
royal writ which still remains, the most venerable
of its muniments, among the city’s archives. Peace
and order were restored. William even attempted,
though in vain, to learn the English tongue that
he might personally administer justice to the

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suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so
tranquil that only a few months had passed after
the battle of Senlac when leaving England in
charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and
his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, the King
returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The
peace he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop
Odo’s tyranny forced the Kentishmen to seek aid
from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the Welsh
princes supported a similar rising against Norman
oppression in the west. But as yet the bulk of the
land held fairly to the new king. Dover was
saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled
over sea to seek refuge in lands as far off as
Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time
formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians
of the Eastern Emperors. William returned to
take his place again as an English king. It was
with an English force that he subdued a rising in
the south-west with Exeter at its head, and it was
at the head of an English army that he completed
his work by marching to the North. His march
brought Eadwine and Morkere again to submission;
a fresh rising ended in the occupation of York, and
England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William’s
feet.

The Norman Conquest

It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068
that transformed the King into a conqueror. The
signal for this revolt came from Swein, king of
Denmark, who had for two years past been

1-168]

preparing to dispute England with the Norman,
but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber
all northern, all western and south-western England
rose as one man. Eadgar the Ætheling with a
band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland
took the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the
south-west the men of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset
gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute;
while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone
bridled a rising in the West. So ably had the
revolt been planned that even William was taken
by surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a
storm of York and the slaughter of three thousand
Normans who formed its garrison. The news of
this slaughter reached William as he was hunting
in the forest of Dean; and in a wild outburst of
wrath he swore “by the splendour of God” to
avenge himself on the North. But wrath went
hand in hand with the coolest statesmanship. The
centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and
pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of
horsemen William bought at a heavy price its
inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward
with the troops that gathered round him he swept
the Welsh border and relieved Shrewsbury while
William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around
Exeter. His success set the King free to fulfil his
oath of vengeance on the North. After a long
delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he
entered York and ravaged the whole country as

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far as the Tees. Town and village were harried
and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven
over the Scottish border. The coast was especially
wasted that no hold might remain for future
landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very
implements of husbandry were so mercilessly
destroyed that a famine which followed is said to
have swept off more than a hundred thousand
victims. Half a century later indeed the land still
lay bare of culture and deserted of men for sixty
miles northward of York. The work of vengeance
once over, William led his army back from the
Tees to York, and thence to Chester and the West.
Never had he shown the grandeur of his character
so memorably as in this terrible march. The
winter was hard, the roads choked with snowdrifts
or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his
army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses
for food, broke out into mutiny at the order to
cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire from
the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and
Britanny demanded their release from service.
William granted their prayer with scorn. On
foot, at the head of the troops which still clung to
him, he forced his way by paths inaccessible to
horses, often helping the men with his own hands
to clear the road, and as the army descended upon
Chester the resistance of the English died away.

For two years William was able to busy himself
in castle-building and in measures for holding

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down the conquered land. How effective these
were was seen when the last act of the conquest
was reached. All hope of Danish aid was now
gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to
Scotland where Eadgar the Ætheling had again
found refuge and where his sister Margaret had
become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably
some assurance of Malcolm’s aid which roused the
Mercian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to a fresh
rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled
by the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell
in an obscure skirmish, while Morkere found
shelter for a while in the fen country where a
desperate band of patriots gathered round an
outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had William
found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway
two miles long was at last driven across the
marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom
died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the
unquestioned master of England that William
marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands and
the Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp
upon the Tay to swear fealty at his feet.

Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from
this point particularly valuable and detailed. The Chronicle
and Florence of Worcester remain the primary English
authorities, while Simeon of Durham gives much special
information on northern matters. For the reign of William
the Red the chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk
of Canterbury, in his “Historia Noverum” and “Life of
Anselm.” William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon
are both contemporary authorities during that of
Henry the First; the latter remains a brief but accurate
annalist; the former is the leader of a new historic school,
who treat English events as part of the history of the world,
and emulate classic models by a more philosophical arrangement
of their materials. To these the opening of Stephen’s
reign adds the “Gesta Stephani,” a record in great detail
by one of the King’s clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.

All this wealth of historical material however suddenly
leaves us in the chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle
dies out in the midst of Stephen’s reign, and the close
at the same time of the works we have noted leaves a
blank in our historical literature which extends over the
early years of Henry the Second. But this dearth is
followed by a vast outburst of historical industry. For the
Beket struggle we have the mass of the Archbishop’s own
correspondence with that of Foliot and John of Salisbury.

1-174]

From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is the Chronicle
known as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose authorship
Professor Stubbs has shown to be more probably due
to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard Fitz-Neal. This is
continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of equally
official value. William of Newburgh’s history, which ends
in 1198, is a work of the classical school, like William of
Malmesbury’s. It is distinguished by its fairness and good
sense. To these may be added the Chronicle of Ralph
Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall, that of
Gervase of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh
of Lincoln.

But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second’s time
is shown even more remarkably in the mass of general
literature which lies behind these distinctively historical
sources, in the treatises of John of Salisbury, the voluminous
works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the “Trifles” and satires of
Walter Map, Glanvill’s treatise on Law, Richard Fitz-Neal’s
“Dialogue on the Exchequer,” to which we owe
our knowledge of Henry’s financial system, the romances of
Gaimar and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal. But this
intellectual fertility is far from ceasing with Henry the
Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun when
the romantic impulse quickens even the old English tongue
in the long poem of Layamon. The Chronicle of Richard
of Devizes and an “Itinerarium Regis” supplement Roger
of Howden for Richard’s reign. With John we enter upon
the Annals of Barnwell and are aided by the invaluable
series of the Chroniclers of St. Albans. Among the side
topics of the time, we may find much information as to the
Jews in Toovey’s “Anglia Judaica”; the Chronicle of
Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep into social and
monastic life; the Cistercian revival may be traced in the
records of the Cistercian abbeys in Dugdale’s Monasticon;
the Charter Rolls give some information as to municipal
history; and constitutional developement may be traced
in the documents collected by Professor Stubbs in his
“Select Charters.”

The Foreign Kings

In the five hundred years that followed the
landing of Hengest Britain had become England,
and its conquest had ended in the settlement of
its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity,
in the birth of a national literature, of an imperfect
civilization, of a rough political order.
But through the whole of this earlier age every
attempt to fuse the various tribes of conquerors
into a single nation had failed. The effort of
Northumbria to extend her rule over all England
had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia;
that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great
kings and statesmen, had no sooner reduced the
country to a seeming unity than local independence
rose again at the call of the Northmen. The
sense of a single England deepened with the
pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of Ælfred

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and his house broadened into an English kingdom;
but still tribal jealousies battled with national
unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon,
Northman from Englishman. A common national
sympathy held the country roughly together, but
a real national union had yet to come. It came
with foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings
broke local jealousies as they had never been
broken before, and bequeathed a new England to
Godwine and the Confessor. But Cnut was more
Englishman than Northman, and his system of
government was an English system. The true
foreign yoke was only felt when England saw its
conqueror in William the Norman.

For nearly a century and a half, from the hour
when William turned triumphant from the fens of
Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters.
Kings from Normandy were followed by kings
from Anjou. But whether under Norman or
Angevin Englishmen were a subject race, conquered
and ruled by men of strange blood and of
strange speech. And yet it was in these years of
subjection that England first became really England.
Provincial differences were finally crushed
into national unity by the pressure of the stranger.
The firm government of her foreign kings secured
the land a long and almost unbroken peace in
which the new nation grew to a sense of its
oneness, and this consciousness was strengthened

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by the political ability which in Henry the First
gave it administrative order and in Henry the
Second built up the fabric of its law. New
elements of social life were developed alike by the
suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
wrong which had been done by the degradation of
the free landowner into a feudal dependant was
partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
of the English lords themselves into a middle
class as they were pushed from their place by the
foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
this social change was accompanied by a gradual
enrichment and elevation of the class of servile
and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted them
at the close of this period into almost complete
freedom. The middle class which was thus created
was reinforced by the upgrowth of a corresponding
class in our towns. Commerce and trade were
promoted by the justice and policy of the foreign
kings; and with their advance rose the political
importance of the trader. The boroughs of
England, which at the opening of this period were
for the most part mere villages, were rich enough
at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to
stand ready for the mightier part they were to
play in the developement of our parliament. The
shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
begot a moral and religious revival which
raised religion into a living thing; while the close
connexion with the Continent which foreign

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conquest brought about secured for England a
new communion with the artistic and intellectual
life of the world without her.

William the Conqueror

In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our
foreign kings that we owe not merely English
wealth and English freedom but England herself.
And of these foreign masters the greatest was
William of Normandy. In William the wild impulses
of the northman’s blood mingled strangely
with the cool temper of the modern statesman.
As he was the last, so he was the most terrible
outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of
the sea-robbers from whom he sprang seemed
embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
strength, his savage countenance, his desperate
bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of
his revenge. “No knight under heaven,” his
enemies owned, “was William’s peer.” Boy as he
was at Val-ès-dunes, horse and man went down
before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his
nature broke out in the warfare of his youth, in
his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five men at
his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk
on fist as if war and the chase were one. No man
could bend William’s bow. His mace crashed its
way through a ring of English warriors to the foot
of the Standard. He rose to his greatest height
at moments when other men despaired. His voice
rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before

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the English charge at Senlac, and his rally turned
the flight into a means of victory. In his winter
march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
his fainting troops and helped with his own hand
to clear a road through the snowdrifts. And with
the northman’s daring broke out the northman’s
pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon
hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of the
“tanner’s” grandson, William tore out his prisoners’
eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung
them into the town. Hundreds of Hampshire
men were driven from their homes to make him
a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria
left Northern England a desolate waste. Of men’s
love or hate he recked little. His grim look, his
pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion,
left William lonely even in his court. His subjects
trembled as he passed. “So stark and
fierce was he,” writes the English chronicler, “that
none dared resist his will.” His very wrath was
solitary. “To no man spake he and no man dared
speak to him” when the news reached him of
Harold’s seizure of the throne. It was only when
he passed from his palace to the loneliness of the
woods that the King’s temper unbent. “He loved
the wild deer as though he had been their father.”

His rule

It was the genius of William which lifted him
out of this mere northman into a great general
and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his
French campaigns, the organization of his attack

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upon England, the victory at Senlac, the quick
resource, the steady perseverance which achieved
the Conquest showed the wide range of his generalship.
His political ability had shown itself from
the first moment of his accession to the ducal
throne. William had the instinct of government.
He had hardly reached manhood when Normandy
lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was crushed.
Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke
“could never love a robber,” be he baron or knave.
The sternness of his temper stamped itself throughout
upon his rule. “Stark he was to men that
withstood him,” says the Chronicler of his English
system of government; “so harsh and cruel was
he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that
did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds;
bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots
of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother:
first he was in the land, but the King cast him
into bondage. If a man would live and hold his
lands, need it were he followed the King’s will.”
Stern as such a rule was, its sternness gave rest to
the land. Even amidst the sufferings which
necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the
enclosure of forests or the exactions which built
up William’s hoard at Winchester, Englishmen
were unable to forget “the good peace he made in
the land, so that a man might fare over his realm
with a bosom full of gold.” Strange touches too

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of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted
with this general temper of the Conqueror’s government.
One of the strongest traits in his
character was an aversion to shed blood by process
of law; he formally abolished the punishment of
death, and only a single execution stains the
annals of his reign. An edict yet more honourable
to his humanity put an end to the slave-trade
which had till then been carried on at the port of
Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness
and pitifulness of his public acts sprang indeed
from a contrast within his temper itself. The
pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a
tender and faithful husband, an affectionate father.
The lonely silence of his bearing broke into gracious
converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm.
If William was “stark” to rebel and baron, men
noted that he was “mild to those that loved God.”

William and feudalism

But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in
more than the order and peace which he imposed
upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of
stamping his own genius on the destinies of a
people; and it is the way in which he seized on
this opportunity which has set William among the
foremost statesmen of the world. The struggle
which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
his position. He no longer held the land merely
as its national and elected King. To his elective
right he added the right of conquest. It is the

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way in which William grasped and employed this
double power that marks the originality of his
political genius, for the system of government
which he devised was in fact the result of this
double origin of his rule. It represented neither
the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the
system of the older English royalty: more truly
perhaps it may be said to have represented both.
As the conqueror of England William developed
the military organization of feudalism so far as
was necessary for the secure possession of his
conquests. The ground was already prepared for
such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
of English feudalism in the warriors, the
“companions” or “thegns” who were personally
attached to the king’s war-band and received
estates from the folk-land in reward for their
personal services. In later times this feudal distribution
of estates had greatly increased as the
bulk of the nobles followed the king’s example
and bound their tenants to themselves by a similar
process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders
on the other hand, the class which formed the basis
of the original English society, had been gradually
reduced in number, partly through imitation of
the class above them, but more through the
pressure of the Danish wars and the social disturbance
consequent upon them which forced these
freemen to seek protectors among the thegns at
the cost of their independence. Even before the

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reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding
the older freedom in England as it had
already superseded it in Germany or France. But
the tendency was quickened and intensified by the
Conquest. The desperate and universal resistance
of the country forced William to hold by the sword
what the sword had won; and an army strong
enough to crush at any moment a national revolt
was needful for the preservation of his throne.
Such an army could only be maintained by a vast
confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the
English risings cleared the ground for its establishment.
The greater part of the higher nobility
fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower
thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their lands
or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest.
We see the completeness of the confiscation in the
vast estates which William was enabled to grant
to his more powerful followers. Two hundred
manors in Kent with more than an equal number
elsewhere rewarded the services of his brother
Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William’s
counsellors Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to
barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares. But
the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the
spoil. The meanest Norman rose to wealth and
power in this new dominion of his lord. Great
or small, each manor thus granted was granted
on condition of its holder’s service at the King’s
call; a whole army was by this means encamped

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upon the soil; and William’s summons could at
any hour gather an overwhelming force around
his standard.

Such a force however, effective as it was against
the conquered English, was hardly less formidable
to the Crown itself. When once it was established,
William found himself fronted in his new realm
by a feudal baronage, by the men whom he had so
hardly bent to his will in Normandy, and who
were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal
power, as eager for an unbridled military and
judicial independence within their own manors,
here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror
was shown in his appreciation of this
danger and in the skill with which he met it.
Large as the estates he granted were, they were
scattered over the country in such a way as to
render union between the great landowners or the
hereditary attachment of great areas of population
to any one separate lord equally impossible. A
yet wiser measure struck at the very root of
feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided
by their owners into smaller sub-tenancies, the
under-tenants were bound by the same conditions
of service to their lord as he to the Crown.
“Hear, my lord,” swore the vassal as kneeling
bareheaded and without arms he placed his hands
within those of his superior, “I become liege man
of yours for life and limb and earthly regard; and
I will keep faith and loyalty to you for life and

1-185]

death, God help me!” Then the kiss of his lord
invested him with land as a “fief” to descend to
him and his heirs for ever. In other countries
such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes,
be they king or no. By the usage however which
William enacted in England each sub-tenant, in
addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore
fealty directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the
King was thus established as the supreme and
universal duty of all Englishmen.

William and England

But the Conqueror’s skill was shown not so
much in these inner checks upon feudalism as in
the counterbalancing forces which he provided
without it. He was not only the head of the
great garrison that held England down, he was
legal and elected King of the English people. If
as Conqueror he covered the country with a new
military organization, as the successor of Eadward
he maintained the judicial and administrative organization
of the old English realm. At the
danger of a severance of the land between the
greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire
became the largest unit of local government, and
in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs for
its administration concentrated the whole executive
power in the King’s hands. The old legal constitution
of the country gave him the whole judicial
power, and William was jealous to retain and
heighten this. While he preserved the local courts

1-186]

of the hundred and the shire he strengthened
the jurisdiction of the King’s Court, which seems
even in the Confessor’s day to have become more
and more a court of highest appeal with a right to
call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to its
bar. The control over the national revenue which
had rested even in the most troubled times in the
hands of the King was turned into a great financial
power by the Conqueror’s system. Over the
whole face of the land a large part of the manors
were burthened with special dues to the Crown:
and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and
recording these that William sent into each
county the commissioners whose enquiries are
recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled
in each hundred declared on oath the
extent and nature of each estate, the names,
number, and condition of its inhabitants, its value
before and after the Conquest, and the sums due
from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
or land-tax levied since the days of Æthelred,
formed as yet the main financial resources of the
Crown, and their exaction carried the royal
authority in its most direct form home to every
landowner. But to these were added a revenue
drawn from the old Crown domain, now largely
increased by the confiscations of the Conquest, the
ever-growing income from the judicial “fines”
imposed by the King’s judges in the King’s courts,
and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown

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on the grant or renewal of every privilege or
charter. A new source of revenue was found in
the Jewish traders, many of whom followed
William from Normandy, and who were glad to
pay freely for the royal protection which enabled
them to settle in their quarters or “Jewries” in all
the principal towns of England.

The Church

William found a yet stronger check on his
baronage in the organization of the Church. Its
old dependence on the royal power was strictly
enforced. Prelates were practically chosen by the
King. Homage was exacted from bishop as from
baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated
save by the King’s leave. No synod could legislate
without his previous assent and subsequent
confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters
could be received within the realm save by his
permission. The King firmly repudiated the
claims which were beginning to be put forward by
the court of Rome. When Gregory VII. called on
him to do fealty for his kingdom the King sternly
refused to admit the claim. “Fealty I have never
willed to do, nor will I do it now. I have never
promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did
it to yours.” William’s reforms only tended to
tighten this hold of the Crown on the clergy.
Stigand was deposed; and the elevation of
Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed
by the removal of most of the English prelates
and by the appointment of Norman ecclesiastics

1-188]

in their place. The new archbishop did much to
restore discipline, and William’s own efforts were
no doubt partly directed by a real desire for the
religious improvement of his realm. But the
foreign origin of the new prelates cut them off
from the flocks they ruled and bound them firmly
to the foreign throne; while their independent
position was lessened by a change which seemed
intended to preserve it. Ecclesiastical cases had
till now been decided, like civil cases, in shire or
hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by side
with ealdorman or sheriff. They were now withdrawn
from it to the separate court of the bishop.
The change was pregnant with future trouble to
the Crown; but for the moment it told mainly in
removing the bishop from his traditional contact
with the popular assembly and in effacing the
memory of the original equality of the religious
with the civil power.

William’s death

In any struggle with feudalism a national
king, secure of the support of the Church, and
backed by the royal hoard at Winchester, stood
in different case from the merely feudal sovereigns
of the Continent. The difference of power was
seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over, and
the struggle which William had anticipated
opened between the baronage and the Crown.
The wisdom of his policy in the destruction of
the great earldoms which had overshadowed the
throne was shown in an attempt at their restoration

1-189]

made in 1075 by Roger, the son of his
minister William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton,
Ralf de Guader, whom the King had rewarded
for his services at Senlac with the earldom of
Norfolk. The rising was quickly suppressed,
Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven over
sea. The intrigues of the baronage soon found
another leader in William’s half-brother, the
Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring
by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo collected
money and men, but the treasure was at once
seized by the royal officers and the bishop
arrested in the midst of the court. Even at the
King’s bidding no officer would venture to seize
on a prelate of the Church; and it was with his
own hands that William was forced to effect his
arrest. The Conqueror was as successful against
foes from without as against foes from within.
The fear of the Danes, which had so long hung
like a thunder-cloud over England, passed away
before the host which William gathered in 1085
to meet a great armament assembled by king
Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, and
the murder of its king removed all peril from the
north. Scotland, already humbled by William’s
invasion, was bridled by the erection of a strong
fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and after penetrating
with his army to the heart of Wales the
King commenced its systematic reduction by
settling three of his great barons along its

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frontier. It was not till his closing years that
William’s unvarying success was troubled by a
fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage under
his son Robert and by an attack which he was
forced to meet in 1087 from France. Its king
mocked at the Conqueror’s unwieldy bulk and at
the sickness which bound him to his bed at
Rouen. “King William has as long a lying-in,”
laughed Philip, “as a woman behind her
curtains.” “When I get up,” William swore
grimly, “I will go to mass in Philip’s land and
bring a rich offering for my churching. I will
offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming
brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over
the fire they make.” At harvest-tide town and
hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border
fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode
down the steep street of Mantes which he had
given to the flames his horse stumbled among
the embers, and William was flung heavily against
his saddle. He was borne home to Rouen to die.
The sound of the minster bell woke him at dawn
as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking
the city–it was the hour of prime–and
stretching out his hands in prayer the King
passed quietly away. Death itself took its colour
from the savage solitude of his life. Priests and
nobles fled as the last breath left him, and the
Conqueror’s body lay naked and lonely on the
floor.

William the Red

With the death of the Conqueror passed the
terror which had held the barons in awe, while
the severance of his dominions roused their hopes
of successful resistance to the stern rule beneath
which they had bowed. William bequeathed
Normandy to his eldest son Robert; but William
the Red, his second son, hastened with his father’s
ring to England where the influence of Lanfranc
secured him the crown. The baronage seized the
opportunity to rise in arms under pretext of
supporting the claims of Robert, whose weakness
of character gave full scope for the growth of
feudal independence; and Bishop Odo, now freed
from prison, placed himself at the head of the
revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly
on the loyalty of his English subjects. But the
national stamp which William had given to his
kingship told at once. The English rallied to

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the royal standard; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester,
the one surviving bishop of English blood, defeated
the insurgents in the west; while the
King, summoning the freemen of country and
town to his host under pain of being branded as
“nithing” or worthless, advanced with a large
force against Rochester where the barons were
concentrated. A plague which broke out among
the garrison forced them to capitulate, and as
the prisoners passed through the royal army cries
of “gallows and cord” burst from the English
ranks. The failure of a later conspiracy whose
aim was to set on the throne a kinsman of the
royal house, Stephen of Albemarle, with the
capture and imprisonment of its head, Robert
Mowbray, the Earl of Northumberland, brought
home at last to the baronage their helplessness
in a strife with the King. The genius of the
Conqueror had saved England from the danger
of feudalism. But he had left as weighty a
danger in the power which trod feudalism
under foot. The power of the Crown was a
purely personal power, restrained under the Conqueror
by his own high sense of duty, but
capable of becoming a pure despotism in the
hands of his son. The nobles were at his feet,
and the policy of his minister, Ranulf Flambard,
loaded their estates with feudal obligations. Each
tenant was held as bound to appear if needful
thrice a year at the royal court, to pay a heavy

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fine or rent on succession to his estate, to
contribute aid in case of the king’s capture in
war or the knighthood of the king’s eldest son
or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir
who was still a minor passed into the king’s
wardship, and all profit from his lands went
during the period of wardship to the king.
If the estate fell to an heiress, her hand was at
the king’s disposal, and was generally sold by
him to the highest bidder. These rights of
“marriage” and “wardship” as well as the exaction
of aids at the royal will poured wealth
into the treasury while they impoverished and
fettered the baronage. A fresh source of revenue
was found in the Church. The same principles
of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as
to those of the nobles; and during the vacancy
of a see or abbey its profits, like those of a minor,
were swept into the royal hoard. William’s
profligacy and extravagance soon tempted him
to abuse this resource, and so steadily did he
refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom
death removed that at the close of his reign one
archbishoprick, four bishopricks, and eleven abbeys
were found to be without pastors.

Vile as was this system of extortion and misrule
but a single voice was raised in protest
against it. Lanfranc had been followed in his
abbey at Bec by the most famous of his scholars,
Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like himself. Friends

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as they were, no two men could be more strangely
unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the
quiet solitude of his mountain-valley, a tenderhearted
poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the
Alpine snows above him, and an intelligence keen
and clear as the mountain-air. The whole temper
of the man was painted in a dream of his youth.
It seemed to him as though heaven lay, a stately
palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, while the
women reaping in the corn-fields of the valley
became harvest-maidens of its king. They reaped
idly, and Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily
climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their
lord. As he reached the palace the king’s voice
called him to his feet and he poured forth his
tale; then at the royal bidding bread of an unearthly
whiteness was set before him, and he ate
and was refreshed. The dream passed with the
morning; but the sense of heaven’s nearness to
earth, the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord,
the tender restfulness and peace in the Divine
presence which it reflected lived on in the life of
Anselm. Wandering like other Italian scholars to
Normandy, he became a monk under Lanfranc,
and on his teacher’s removal to higher duties
succeeded him in the direction of the Abbey of
Bec. No teacher has ever thrown a greater spirit
of love into his toil. “Force your scholars to
improve!” he burst out to another teacher who
relied on blows and compulsion. “Did you ever

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see a craftsman fashion a fair image out of a golden
plate by blows alone? Does he not now gently press
it and strike it with his tools, now with wise art
yet more gently raise and shape it? What do
your scholars turn into under this ceaseless beating?”
“They turn only brutal,” was the reply.
“You have bad luck,” was the keen answer, “in
a training that only turns men into beasts.” The
worst natures softened before this tenderness and
patience. Even the Conqueror, so harsh and
terrible to others, became another man, gracious
and easy of speech, with Anselm. But amidst his
absorbing cares as a teacher, the Prior of Bec found
time for philosophical speculations to which we
owe the scientific inquiries which built up the
theology of the Middle Ages. His famous works
were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to
elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the
human reason. His passion for abstruse thought
robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he
could hardly pray. Often the night was a long
watch till he could seize his conception and write
it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But
not even a fever of intense thought such as this
could draw Anselm’s heart from its passionate
tenderness and love. Sick monks in the infirmary
could relish no drink save the juice which his hand
squeezed for them from the grape-bunch. In the
later days of his archbishoprick a hare chased by
the hounds took refuge under his horse, and his

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gentle voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman
to stir in the chase while the creature darted off
again to the woods. Even the greed of lands for
the Church to which so many religious men yielded
found its characteristic rebuke as the battling
lawyers in such a suit saw Anselm quietly close his
eyes in court and go peacefully to sleep.

William and Anselm

A sudden impulse of the Red King drew the
abbot from these quiet studies into the storms of
the world. The see of Canterbury had long been
left without a Primate when a dangerous illness
frightened the king into the promotion of Anselm.
The Abbot, who happened at the time to be in
England on the business of his house, was dragged
to the royal couch and the cross forced into his
hands. But William had no sooner recovered from
his sickness than he found himself face to face with
an opponent whose meek and loving temper rose
into firmness and grandeur when it fronted the
tyranny of the king. Much of the struggle
between William and the Archbishop turned on
questions such as the right of investiture, which
have little bearing on our history, but the particular
question at issue was of less importance than the
fact of a contest at all. The boldness of Anselm’s
attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical
servitude but infused through the nation
at large a new spirit of independence. The real
character of the strife appears in the Primate’s
answer when his remonstrances against the lawless

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exactions from the Church were met by a demand
for a present on his own promotion, and his first
offer of five hundred pounds was contemptuously
refused. “Treat me as a free man,” Anselm
replied, “and I devote myself and all that I have
to your service, but if you treat me as a slave you
shall have neither me nor mine.” A burst of the
Red King’s fury drove the Archbishop from court,
and he finally decided to quit the country, but his
example had not been lost, and the close of William’s
reign found a new spirit of freedom in England
with which the greatest of the Conqueror’s sons
was glad to make terms. His exile however left
William without a check. Supreme at home, he
was full of ambition abroad. As a soldier the Red
King was little inferior to his father. Normandy
had been pledged to him by his brother Robert in
exchange for a sum which enabled the Duke to
march in the first Crusade for the delivery of the
Holy Land, and a rebellion at Le Mans was subdued
by the fierce energy with which William
flung himself at the news of it into the first boat
he found, and crossed the Channel in face of a
storm. “Kings never drown,” he replied contemptuously
to the remonstrances of his followers.
Homage was again wrested from Malcolm by a
march to the Firth of Forth, and the subsequent
death of that king threw Scotland into a disorder
which enabled an army under Eadgar Ætheling to
establish Eadgar, the son of Margaret, as an English

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feudatory on the throne. In Wales William was
less triumphant, and the terrible losses inflicted on
the heavy Norman cavalry in the fastnesses of
Snowdon forced him to fall back on the slower but
wiser policy of the Conqueror. But triumph and
defeat alike ended in a strange and tragical close.
In 1100 the Red King was found dead by peasants
in a glade of the New Forest, with the arrow
either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast.

Henry the First

Robert was at this moment on his return from
the Holy Land, where his bravery had redeemed
much of his earlier ill-fame, and the English crown
was seized by his younger brother Henry in spite
of the opposition of the baronage, who clung to
the Duke of Normandy and the union of their
estates on both sides the Channel under a single
ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it had
thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and
the two great measures which followed his coronation,
his grant of a charter, and his marriage with
Matilda, mark the new relation which this support
brought about between the people and their king.
Henry’s Charter is important, not merely as a
direct precedent for the Great Charter of John,
but as the first limitation on the despotism established
by the Conqueror and carried to such a
height by his son. The “evil customs” by which
the Red King had enslaved and plundered the
Church were explicitly renounced in it, the unlimited
demands made by both the Conqueror and

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his son on the baronage exchanged for customary
fees, while the rights of the people itself, though
recognized more vaguely, were not forgotten. The
barons were held to do justice to their undertenants
and to renounce tyrannical exactions from
them, the king promising to restore order and the
“law of Eadward,” the old constitution of the
realm, with the changes which his father had introduced.
His marriage gave a significance to these
promises which the meanest English peasant could
understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter
of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret, the
sister of Eadgar Ætheling. She had been brought
up in the nunnery of Romsey where her aunt Christina
was a nun; and the veil which she had taken
there formed an obstacle to her union with the
King, which was only removed by the wisdom of
Anselm. While Flambard, the embodiment of the
Red King’s despotism, was thrown into the Tower,
the Archbishop’s recall had been one of Henry’s
first acts after his accession. Matilda appeared
before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate
earnestness. She had been veiled in her childhood,
she asserted, only to save her from the
insults of the rude soldiery who infested the land,
had flung the veil from her again and again, and
had yielded at last to the unwomanly taunts, the
actual blows of her aunt. “As often as I stood in
her presence,” the girl pleaded, “I wore the veil,
trembling as I wore it with indignation and grief.

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But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used
to snatch it from my head, fling it on the ground,
and trample it under foot. That was the way,
and none other, in which I was veiled.” Anselm
at once declared her free from conventual bonds,
and the shout of the English multitude when he
set the crown on Matilda’s brow drowned the
murmur of Churchman or of baron. The mockery
of the Norman nobles, who nicknamed the king
and his spouse Godric and Godgifu, was lost in the
joy of the people at large. For the first time since
the Conquest an English sovereign sat on the
English throne. The blood of Cerdic and Ælfred
was to blend itself with that of Hrolf and the
Conqueror. Henceforth it was impossible that
the two peoples should remain parted from each
other; so quick indeed was their union that the
very name of Norman had passed away in half a
century, and at the accession of Henry’s grandson
it was impossible to distinguish between the
descendants of the conquerors and those of the
conquered at Senlac.

Henry and the Barons

Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm
among his subjects which enabled Henry to defy
the claims of his brother and the disaffection of
his nobles. Early in 1101 Robert landed at
Portsmouth to win the crown in arms. The
great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof
from the king. But the Norman Duke found
himself face to face with an English army which

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gathered at Anselm’s summons round Henry’s
standard. The temper of the English had rallied
from the panic of Senlac. The soldiers who came
to fight for their king “nowise feared the Normans.”
As Henry rode along their lines showing
them how to keep firm their shield-wall against
the lances of Robert’s knighthood, he was met
with shouts for battle. But king and duke alike
shrank from a contest in which the victory of
either side would have undone the Conqueror’s
work. The one saw his effort was hopeless, the
other was only anxious to remove his rival from
the realm, and by a peace which the Count of
Meulan negotiated Robert recognized Henry as
King of England while Henry gave up his fief
in the Cotentin to his brother the Duke. Robert’s
retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the
barons who had forsaken him. Robert de Lacy
was stripped of his manors in Yorkshire; Robert
Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk; Ivo
of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to
the Holy Land as a pilgrim. But greater even
than these was Robert of Belesme, the son of
Roger of Montgomery, who held in England the
earldoms of Shrewsbury and Arundel, while in
Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and Alençon.
Robert stood at the head of the baronage in wealth
and power: and his summons to the King’s Court
to answer for his refusal of aid to the king was
answered by a haughty defiance. But again

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the Norman baronage had to feel the strength
which English loyalty gave to the Crown. Sixty
thousand Englishmen followed Henry to the attack
of Robert’s strongholds along the Welsh border.
It was in vain that the nobles about the king,
conscious that Robert’s fall left them helpless in
Henry’s hands, strove to bring about a peace.
The English soldiers shouted “Heed not these
traitors, our lord King Henry,” and with the
people at his back the king stood firm. Only
an early surrender saved Robert’s life. He was
suffered to retire to his estates in Normandy, but
his English lands were confiscated to the Crown.
“Rejoice, King Henry,” shouted the English
soldiers, “for you began to be a free king on
that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme
and drove him from the land.” Master of his
own realm and enriched by the confiscated lands
of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy,
where the misgovernment of the Duke
had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk, and
where the outrages of nobles like Robert of
Belesme forced the more peaceful classes to call
the king to their aid. In 1106 his forces met
those of his brother on the field of Tenchebray,
and a decisive English victory on Norman soil
avenged the shame of Hastings. The conquered
duchy became a dependency of the English crown,
and Henry’s energies were frittered away through
a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts, the

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hostility of the French, and the efforts of his
nephew William, the son of Robert, to regain
the crown which his father had lost.

Henry’s rule

With the victory of Tenchebray Henry was
free to enter on that work of administration
which was to make his reign memorable in our
history. Successful as his wars had been he was
in heart no warrior but a statesman, and his
greatness showed itself less in the field than in
the council chamber. His outer bearing like his
inner temper stood in marked contrast to that
of his father. Well read, accomplished, easy and
fluent of speech, the lord of a harem of mistresses,
the centre of a gay court where poet and jongleur
found a home, Henry remained cool, self-possessed,
clear-sighted, hard, methodical, loveless himself,
and neither seeking nor desiring his people’s love,
but wringing from them their gratitude and regard
by sheer dint of good government. His work of
order was necessarily a costly work; and the
steady pressure of his taxation, a pressure made
the harder by local famines and plagues during
his reign, has left traces of the grumbling it
roused in the pages of the English Chronicle.
But even the Chronicler is forced to own amidst
his grumblings that Henry “was a good man,
and great was the awe of him.” He had little
of his father’s creative genius, of that far-reaching
originality by which the Conqueror stamped himself
and his will on the very fabric of our history.

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But he had the passion for order, the love of
justice, the faculty of organization, the power of
steady and unwavering rule, which was needed
to complete the Conqueror’s work. His aim was
peace, and the title of the Peace-loving King
which was given him at his death showed with
what a steadiness and constancy he carried out
his aim. In Normandy indeed his work was ever
and anon undone by outbreaks of its baronage,
outbreaks sternly repressed only that the work
might be patiently and calmly taken up again
where it had been broken off. But in England
his will was carried out with a perfect success.
For more than a quarter of a century the land
had rest. Without, the Scots were held in friendship,
the Welsh were bridled by a steady and
well-planned scheme of gradual conquest. Within,
the licence of the baronage was held sternly down,
and justice secured for all. “He governed with
a strong hand,” says Orderic, but the strong hand
was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant. “Great
was the awe of him,” writes the annalist of Peterborough.
“No man durst ill-do to another in
his days. Peace he made for man and beast.”
Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles
who withstood him, they were blows which his
English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.
“While he mastered by policy the foremost counts
and lords and the boldest tyrants, he ever cherished
and protected peaceful men and men of religion

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and men of the middle class.” What impressed
observers most was the unswerving, changeless
temper of his rule. The stern justice, the terrible
punishments he inflicted on all who broke his
laws, were parts of a fixed system which differed
widely from the capricious severity of a mere
despot. Hardly less impressive was his unvarying
success. Heavy as were the blows which destiny
levelled at him, Henry bore and rose unconquered
from all. To the end of his life the proudest
barons lay bound and blinded in his prison. His
hoard grew greater and greater. Normandy, toss
as she might, lay helpless at his feet to the last.
In England it was only after his death that men
dared mutter what evil things they had thought
of Henry the Peace-lover, or censure the pitilessness,
the greed, and the lust which had blurred
the wisdom and splendour of his rule.

Henry’s Administration

His vigorous administration carried out into
detail the system of government which the Conqueror
had sketched. The vast estates which had
fallen to the crown through revolt and forfeiture
were granted out to new men dependent on royal
favour. On the ruins of the great feudatories
whom he had crushed Henry built up a class of
lesser nobles, whom the older barons of the
Conquest looked down on in scorn, but who were
strong enough to form a counterpoise to their
influence, while they furnished the Crown with a
class of useful administrators whom Henry employed

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as his sheriffs and judges. A new organization
of justice and finance bound the kingdom
more tightly together in Henry’s grasp. The
Clerks of the Royal Chapel were formed into a
body of secretaries or royal ministers, whose head
bore the title of Chancellor. Above them stood
the Justiciar, or Lieutenant-General of the kingdom,
who in the frequent absence of the king
acted as Regent of the realm, and whose staff,
selected from the barons connected with the royal
household, were formed into a Supreme Court of
the realm. The King’s Court, as this was called,
permanently represented the whole court of royal
vassals which had hitherto been summoned thrice
in the year. As the royal council, it revised and
registered laws, and its “counsel and consent,”
though merely formal, preserved the principle of
the older popular legislation. As a court of justice,
it formed the highest court of appeal: it could
call up any suit from a lower tribunal on the
application of a suitor, while the union of several
sheriffdoms under some of its members connected
it closely with the local courts. As a financial
body, its chief work lay in the assessment and
collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took
the name of the Court of Exchequer from the
chequered table, much like a chess-board, at which
it sat and on which accounts were rendered. In
their financial capacity its justices became “barons
of the Exchequer.” Twice every year the sheriff

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of each county appeared before these barons and
rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal
domains, the Danegeld or land tax, the fines of the
local courts, the feudal aids from the baronial
estates, which formed the chief part of the royal
revenue. Local disputes respecting these payments
or the assessment of the town-rents were settled
by a detachment of barons from the court who
made the circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal
visitations led to the judicial visitations, the
“judges’ circuits,” which still form so marked a
feature in our legal system.

The Angevin Marriage

Measures such as these changed the whole
temper of the Norman rule. It remained a despotism,
but from this moment it was a despotism
regulated and held in check by the forms of administrative
routine. Heavy as was the taxation
under Henry the First, terrible as was the suffering
throughout his reign from famine and plague,
the peace and order which his government secured
through thirty years won a rest for the land in which
conqueror and conquered blended into a single people
and in which this people slowly moved forward to
a new freedom. But while England thus rested
in peace a terrible blow broke the fortunes of her
king. In 1120 his son, William the “Ætheling,”
with a crowd of nobles accompanied Henry on his
return from Normandy; but the White Ship in
which he embarked lingered behind the rest of the
royal fleet till the guards of the king’s treasure

1-208]

pressed its departure. It had hardly cleared the
harbour when the ship’s side struck on a rock, and
in an instant it sank beneath the waves. One
terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the
night, was heard by the royal fleet; but it was not
till the morning that the fatal news reached the
king. Stern as he was, Henry fell senseless to
the ground, and rose never to smile again. He had
no other son, and the circle of his foreign foes
closed round him the more fiercely that William,
the son of his captive brother Robert, was now his
natural heir. Henry hated William while he loved
his own daughter Maud, who had been married to
the Emperor Henry the Fifth, but who had been
restored by his death to her father’s court. The
succession of a woman was new in English history;
it was strange to a feudal baronage. But when
all hope of issue from a second wife whom he
wedded was over Henry forced priests and nobles
to swear allegiance to Maud as their future mistress,
and affianced her to Geoffry the Handsome, the
son of the one foe whom he dreaded, Count Fulk
of Anjou.

Anjou

The marriage of Matilda was but a step in the
wonderful history by which the descendants of a
Breton woodman became masters not of Anjou
only, but of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of
Gascony and Auvergne, of Aquitaine and Normandy,
and sovereigns at last of the great realm
which Normandy had won. The legend of the

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father of their race carries us back to the times of
our own Ælfred, when the Danes were ravaging
along Loire as they ravaged along Thames. In
the heart of the Breton border, in the debateable
land between France and Britanny, dwelt Tortulf
the Forester, half-brigand, half-hunter as the
gloomy days went, living in free outlaw-fashion in
the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in
his rough forest school “how to strike the foe, to
sleep on the bare ground, to bear hunger and toil,
summer’s heat and winter’s frost, how to fear
nothing save ill-fame.” Following King Charles the
Bald in his struggle with the Danes, the woodman
won broad lands along Loire, and his son Ingelger,
who had swept the northmen from Touraine and
the land to the west, which they had burned and
wasted into a vast solitude, became the first Count
of Anjou. But the tale of Tortulf and Ingelger is
a mere creation of some twelfth century jongleur.
The earliest Count whom history recognizes is
Fulk the Red. Fulk attached himself to the Dukes
of France who were now drawing nearer to the
throne, and between 909 and 929 he received
from them in guerdon the county of Anjou. The
story of his son is a story of peace, breaking like a
quiet idyll the war-storms of his house. Alone of
his race Fulk the Good waged no wars: his delight
was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called
“Canon.” One Martinmas eve Fulk was singing
there in clerkly guise when the French king,

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Lewis d’Outremer, entered the church. “He
sings like a priest,” laughed the king as his nobles
pointed mockingly to the figure of the Count-Canon.
But Fulk was ready with his reply.
“Know, my lord,” wrote the Count of Anjou,
“that a king unlearned is a crowned ass.” Fulk
was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing,
enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every
corner of the wasted land. To him alone of his
race men gave the title of “the Good.”

Fulk the Black

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little
more than a bold, dashing soldier, Fulk’s son,
Geoffry Greygown, sank almost into a vassal of
his powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and
Champagne. But this vassalage was roughly
shaken off by his successor. Fulk Nerra, Fulk the
Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in
whom we can trace that marked type of character
which their house was to preserve through two
hundred years. He was without natural affection.
In his youth he burnt a wife at the stake, and
legend told how he led her to her doom decked out
in his gayest attire. In his old age he waged his
bitterest war against his son, and exacted from him
when vanquished a humiliation which men reserved
for the deadliest of their foes. “You are conquered,
you are conquered!” shouted the old man
in fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled and saddled
like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his
father’s feet. In Fulk first appeared that low type

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of superstition which startled even superstitious
ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he was
of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical
censures, the fear of the end of the world drove
Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre. Barefoot and with
the strokes of the scourge falling heavily on his
shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a
halter through the streets of Jerusalem, and courted
the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of
penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert
of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin,
by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him
of his lands. He secured the terrified friendship
of the French king by despatching twelve assassins
to cut down before his eyes the minister who had
troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason
and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool
cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of
Heaven to have been revealed against the union of
the worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But
neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men
broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his
success.

At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least
important of the greater provinces of France. At
his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at least
in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed,
clear-sighted, quick to resolve, quicker to strike,
Fulk’s career was one long series of victories over
all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and

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he had the gift of personal bravery, which was
denied to some of his greatest descendants. There
was a moment in the first of his battles when the
day seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of
the Bretons drew the Angevin horsemen into a
line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was
flung heavily to the ground. Dragged from the
medley of men and horses, he swept down almost
singly on the foe “as a storm-wind” (so rang the
pæan of the Angevins) “sweeps down on the thick
corn-rows,” and the field was won. But to these
qualities of the warrior he added a power of
political organization, a capacity for far-reaching
combinations, a faculty of statesmanship, which
became the heritage of his race, and lifted them
as high above the intellectual level of the rulers
of their time as their shameless wickedness degraded
them below the level of man. His overthrow
of Britanny on the field of Conquereux was
followed by the gradual absorption of Southern
Touraine; a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival
house of Blois; the seizure of Saumur completed
his conquests in the south, while Northern Touraine
was won bit by bit till only Tours resisted the
Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its Count,
Herbert Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.

Death of Henry

His work of conquest was completed by his
son. Geoffry Martel wrested Tours from the
Count of Blois, and by the seizure of Le Mans
brought his border to the Norman frontier. Here

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however his advance was checked by the genius
of William the Conqueror, and with his death the
greatness of Anjou came for a while to an end.
Stripped of Maine by the Normans and broken
by dissensions within, the weak and profligate rule
of Fulk Rechin left Anjou powerless. But in 1109
it woke to fresh energy with the accession of his
son, Fulk of Jerusalem. Now urging the turbulent
Norman nobles to revolt, now supporting Robert’s
son, William, in his strife with his uncle, offering
himself throughout as the loyal supporter of the
French kingdom which was now hemmed in on
almost every side by the forces of the English
king and of his allies the Counts of Blois and
Champagne, Fulk was the one enemy whom
Henry the First really feared. It was to disarm
his restless hostility that the king gave the hand
of Matilda to Geoffry the Handsome. But the
hatred between Norman and Angevin had been
too bitter to make such a marriage popular, and
the secrecy with which it was brought about
was held by the barons to free them from the
oath they had previously sworn. As no baron
if he was sonless could give a husband to his
daughter save with his lord’s consent, the nobles
held by a strained analogy that their own assent
was needful to the marriage of Maud. Henry
found a more pressing danger in the greed of her
husband Geoffry, whose habit of wearing the
common broom of Anjou, the planta genista, in

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his helmet gave him the title of Plantagenet.
His claims ended at last in intrigues with the
Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border
to meet an Angevin invasion; but the plot broke
down at his presence, the Angevins retired, and at
the close of 1135 the old king withdrew to the
Forest of Lions to die.

Stephen

“God give him,” wrote the Archbishop of
Rouen from Henry’s death-bed, “the peace he
loved.” With him indeed closed the long peace
of the Norman rule. An outburst of anarchy
followed on the news of his departure, and in the
midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew,
appeared at the gates of London. Stephen was a
son of the Conqueror’s daughter, Adela, who had
married a Count of Blois; he had been brought
up at the English court, had been made Count of
Mortain by Henry, had become Count of Boulogne
by his marriage, and as head of the Norman
baronage had been the first to pledge himself to
support Matilda’s succession. But his own claim
as nearest male heir of the Conqueror’s blood (for
his cousin, the son of Robert, had fallen some years
before in Flanders) was supported by his personal
popularity; mere swordsman as he was, his good-humour,
his generosity, his very prodigality made
Stephen a favourite with all. No noble however
had as yet ventured to join him nor had any town
opened its gates when London poured out to meet
him with uproarious welcome. Neither baron nor

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prelate was present to constitute a National Council,
but the great city did not hesitate to take their place.
The voice of her citizens had long been accepted
as representative of the popular assent in the
election of a king; but it marks the progress of
English independence under Henry that London
now claimed of itself the right of election.
Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary
counsellors of the crown its “Aldermen and wise
folk gathered together the folk-moot, and these
providing at their own will for the good of the
realm unanimously resolved to choose a king.”
The solemn deliberation ended in the choice of
Stephen, the citizens swore to defend the king
with money and blood, Stephen swore to apply
his whole strength to the pacification and good
government of the realm. It was in fact the
new union of conquered and conquerors into a
single England that did Stephen’s work. The
succession of Maud meant the rule of Geoffry of
Anjou, and to Norman as to Englishman the rule
of the Angevin was a foreign rule. The welcome
Stephen won at London and Winchester, his seizure
of the royal treasure, the adhesion of the Justiciar
Bishop Roger to his cause, the reluctant consent
of the Archbishop, the hopelessness of aid from
Anjou where Geoffry was at this moment pressed
by revolt, the need above all of some king to meet
the outbreak of anarchy which followed Henry’s
death, secured Stephen the voice of the baronage.

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He was crowned at Christmas-tide; and soon
joined by Robert Earl of Gloucester, a bastard
son of Henry and the chief of his nobles; while
the issue of a charter from Oxford in 1136, a
charter which renewed the dead king’s pledge of
good government, promised another Henry to the
realm. The charter surrendered all forests made
in the last reign as a sop to the nobles, and conciliated
the Church by granting freedom of election
and renouncing all right to the profits of vacant
churches; while the king won the people by a
promise to abolish the tax of Danegeld.

Battle of the Standard

The king’s first two years were years of success
and prosperity. Two risings of barons in the east
and west were easily put down, and in 1137
Stephen passed into Normandy and secured the
Duchy against an attack from Anjou. But already
the elements of trouble were gathering round him.
Stephen was a mere soldier, with few kingly
qualities save that of a soldier’s bravery; and
the realm soon began to slip from his grasp.
He turned against himself the jealous dread of
foreigners to which he owed his accession by
surrounding himself with hired knights from
Flanders; he drained the treasury by creating
new earls endowed with pensions from it, and
recruited his means by base coinage. His consciousness
of the gathering storm only drove
Stephen to bind his friends to him by suffering
them to fortify castles and to renew the feudal

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tyranny which Henry had struck down. But the
long reign of the dead king had left the Crown so
strong that even yet Stephen could hold his
own. A plot which Robert of Gloucester had
been weaving from the outset of his reign came
indeed to a head in 1138, and the Earl’s revolt
stripped Stephen of Caen and half Normandy.
But when his partizans in England rose in the
south and the west and the King of Scots, whose
friendship Stephen had bought in the opening of
his reign by the cession of Carlisle, poured over the
northern border, the nation stood firmly by the king.
Stephen himself marched on the western rebels
and soon left them few strongholds save Bristol.
His people fought for him in the north. The
pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway
and the Highlands roused the spirit of the Yorkshiremen.
Baron and freeman gathered at York
round Archbishop Thurstan and marched to the
field of Northallerton to await the foe. The
sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St.
Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St.
Wilfrid of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in
a four-wheeled car which stood in the centre
of the host. The first onset of David’s host
was a terrible one. “I who wear no armour,”
shouted the chief of the Galwegians, “will go as
far this day as any one with breastplate of mail”;
his men charged with wild shouts of “Albin,
Albin,” and were followed by the Norman knighthood

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of the Lowlands. But their repulse was complete;
the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the
close English ranks around the Standard, and the
whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle.

Seizure of the Bishops

Weak indeed as Stephen was, the administrative
organization of Henry still did its work.
Roger remained justiciar, his son was chancellor,
his nephew Nigel, the Bishop of Ely, was treasurer.
Finance and justice were thus concentrated in the
hands of a single family which preserved amidst
the deepening misrule something of the old order
and rule, and which stood at the head of the “new
men,” whom Henry had raised into importance
and made the instruments of his will. These new
men were still weak by the side of the older
nobles; and conscious of the jealousy and ill-will
with which they were regarded they followed in
self-defence the example which the barons were
setting in building and fortifying castles on their
domains. Roger and his house, the objects from
their official position of a deeper grudge than any,
were carried away by the panic. The justiciar
and his son fortified their castles, and it was only
with a strong force at their back that the prelates
appeared at court. Their attitude was one to
rouse Stephen’s jealousy, and the news of Matilda’s
purpose of invasion lent strength to the doubts
which the nobles cast on their fidelity. All the
weak violence of the king’s temper suddenly broke
out. He seized Roger the Chancellor and the

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Bishop of Lincoln when they appeared at Oxford
in June 1139, and forced them to surrender their
strongholds. Shame broke the justiciar’s heart;
he died at the close of the year, and his nephew
Nigel of Ely was driven from the realm. But the
fall of this house shattered the whole system of
government. The King’s Court and the Exchequer
ceased to work at a moment when the landing of
Earl Robert and the Empress Matilda set Stephen
face to face with a danger greater than he had yet
encountered, while the clergy, alienated by the
arrest of the Bishops and the disregard of their
protests, stood angrily aloof.

Civil War

The three bases of Henry’s system of government,
the subjection of the baronage to the law,
the good-will of the Church, and the organization
of justice and finance, were now utterly ruined;
and for the fourteen years which passed from
this hour to the Treaty of Wallingford England
was given up to the miseries of civil war. The
country was divided between the adherents of the
two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, London
and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln in
1141 left the latter a captive in the hands of his
enemies, while Matilda was received throughout
the land as its “Lady.” But the disdain with
which she repulsed the claim of London to the
enjoyment of its older privileges called its
burghers to arms; her resolve to hold Stephen a
prisoner roused his party again to life, and she

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was driven to Oxford to be besieged there in 1142
by Stephen himself, who had obtained his release
in exchange for Earl Robert after the capture of
the Earl in a battle at Winchester. She escaped
from the castle, but with the death of Robert her
struggle became a hopeless one, and in 1148 she
withdrew to Normandy. The war was now a
mere chaos of pillage and bloodshed. The royal
power came to an end. The royal courts were
suspended, for not a baron or bishop would come
at the king’s call. The bishops met in council to
protest, but their protests and excommunications
fell on deafened ears. For the first and last time
in her history England was in the hands of the
baronage, and their outrages showed from what
horrors the stern rule of the Norman kings had
saved her. Castles sprang up everywhere. “They
filled the land with castles,” say the terrible
annals of the time. “They greatly oppressed
the wretched people by making them work at
these castles, and when they were finished they
filled them with devils and armed men.” In each
of these robber-holds a petty tyrant ruled like a
king. The strife for the Crown had broken into
a medley of feuds between baron and baron, for
none could brook an equal or a superior in his
fellow. “They fought among themselves with
deadly hatred, they spoiled the fairest lands with
fire and rapine; in what had been the most fertile
of counties they destroyed almost all the provision

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of bread.” For fight as they might with one
another, all were at one in the plunder of the
land. Towns were put to ransom. Villages were
sacked and burned. All who were deemed to
have goods, whether men or women, were carried
off and flung into dungeons and tortured till they
yielded up their wealth. No ghastlier picture of
a nation’s misery has ever been painted than that
which closes the English Chronicle whose last
accents falter out amidst the horrors of the time.
“They hanged up men by their feet and smoked
them with foul smoke. Some were hanged up by
their thumbs, others by the head, and burning
things were hung on to their feet. They put
knotted strings about men’s heads, and writhed
them till they went to the brain. They put men
into prisons where adders and snakes and toads
were crawling, and so they tormented them.
Some they put into a chest short and narrow and
not deep and that had sharp stones within, and
forced men therein so that they broke all their
limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and
grim things called rachenteges, which two or three
men had enough to do to carry. It was thus
made: it was fastened to a beam and had a sharp
iron to go about a man’s neck and throat, so that
he might noways sit, or lie, or sleep, but he bore
all the iron. Many thousands they starved with
hunger.”

Religious Revival

It was only after years of this feudal anarchy

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that England was rescued from it by the efforts of
the Church. The political influence of the Church
had been greatly lessened by the Conquest: for
pious, learned, and energetic as the bulk of the
Conqueror’s bishops were, they were not Englishmen.
Till the reign of Henry the First no Englishman
occupied an English see. This severance of
the higher clergy from the lower priesthood and
from the people went far to paralyze the constitutional
influence of the Church. Anselm stood
alone against Rufus, and when Anselm was gone
no voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the silence
of the reign of Henry the First. But at the close
of Henry’s reign and throughout the reign of
Stephen England was stirred by the first of those
great religious movements which it was to experience
afterwards in the preaching of the Friars, the
Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the Puritan
enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys.
Everywhere in town and country men banded
themselves together for prayer: hermits flocked
to the woods: noble and churl welcomed the
austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the
Benedictine order, as they spread over the moors
and forests of the North. A new spirit of devotion
woke the slumbers of the religious houses, and
penetrated alike to the home of the noble and the
trader. London took its full share in the revival.
The city was proud of its religion, its thirteen
conventual and more than a hundred parochial

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churches. The new impulse changed its very
aspect. In the midst of the city Bishop Richard
busied himself with the vast cathedral church of
St. Paul which Bishop Maurice had begun; barges
came up the river with stone from Caen for the
great arches that moved the popular wonder,
while street and lane were being levelled to make
room for its famous churchyard. Rahere, a
minstrel at Henry’s court, raised the Priory of St.
Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built St.
Giles’s at Cripplegate. The old English Cnichtenagild
surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site
for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale
of this house paints admirably the temper of the
citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior Norman,
built church and cloister and bought books and
vestments in so liberal a fashion that no money
remained to buy bread. The canons were at their
last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the
refectory as they passed round the cloister in their
usual Sunday procession, saw the tables laid but
not a single loaf on them. “Here is a fine set
out,” said the citizens; “but where is the bread to
come from?” The women who were present
vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday, and
there was soon bread enough and to spare for the
priory and its priests.

Thomas of London

We see the strength of the new movement in
the new class of ecclesiastics whom it forced on to
the stage. Men like Archbishop Theobald drew

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whatever influence they wielded from a belief in
their holiness of life and unselfishness of aim.
The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new
impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at
the moment we have reached its power was found
strong enough to wrest England out of the chaos
of feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen’s
reign his brother Henry, the Bishop of Winchester,
who had been appointed in 1139 Papal Legate for
the realm, had striven to supply the absence of any
royal or national authority by convening synods of
bishops, and by asserting the moral right of the
Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the
throne. The compact between king and people
which became a part of constitutional law in the
Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the
Charter of Stephen, but its legitimate consequence
in the responsibility of the crown for the execution
of the compact was first drawn out by these
ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions
of Stephen and Matilda flowed the after
depositions of Edward and Richard, and the
solemn act by which the succession was changed
in the case of James. Extravagant and unauthorized
as their expression of it may appear, they
expressed the right of a nation to good government.
Henry of Winchester however, “half monk, half
soldier,” as he was called, possessed too little
religious influence to wield a really spiritual power,
and it was only at the close of Stephen’s reign that

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the nation really found a moral leader in Theobald,
the Archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald’s ablest
agent and adviser was Thomas, the son of Gilbert
Beket, a leading citizen and, it is said, Portreeve
of London, the site of whose house is still marked
by the Mercers’ chapel in Cheapside. His mother
Rohese was a type of the devout woman of her
day; she weighed her boy every year on his birthday
against money, clothes, and provisions which
she gave to the poor. Thomas grew up amidst the
Norman barons and clerks who frequented his
father’s house with a genial freedom of character
tempered by the Norman refinement; he passed
from the school of Merton to the University of
Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of
the young nobles of the time. Tall, handsome,
bright-eyed, ready of wit and speech, his firmness
of temper showed itself in his very sports; to
rescue his hawk which had fallen into the water
he once plunged into a millrace and was all but
crushed by the wheel. The loss of his father’s
wealth drove him to the court of Archbishop
Theobald, and he soon became the Primate’s confidant
in his plans for the rescue of England.

Treaty of Wallingford

The natural influence which the Primate would
have exerted was long held in suspense by the
superior position of Bishop Henry of Winchester
as Papal Legate; but this office ceased with the
Pope who granted it, and when in 1150 it was
transferred to the Archbishop himself Theobald

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soon made his weight felt. The long disorder of
the realm was producing its natural reaction in
exhaustion and disgust, as well as in a general
craving for return to the line of hereditary succession
whose breaking seemed the cause of the
nation’s woes. But the growth of their son Henry
to manhood set naturally aside the pretensions
both of Count Geoffry and Matilda. Young as he
was Henry already showed the cool long-sighted
temper which was to be his characteristic on the
throne. Foiled in an early attempt to grasp the
crown, he looked quietly on at the disorder which
was doing his work till the death of his father at
the close of 1151 left him master of Normandy and
Anjou. In the spring of the following year his
marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou,
added Aquitaine to his dominions. Stephen saw
the gathering storm, and strove to meet it. He
called on the bishops and baronage to secure the
succession of his son Eustace by consenting to
his association with him in the kingdom. But
the moment was now come for Theobald to play
his part. He was already negotiating through
Thomas of London with Henry and the Pope; he
met Stephen’s plans by a refusal to swear fealty to
his son, and the bishops, in spite of Stephen’s
threats, went with their head. The blow was
soon followed by a harder one. Thomas, as
Theobald’s agent, invited Henry to appear in
England, and though the Duke disappointed his

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supporters’ hopes by the scanty number of men he
brought with him in 1153, his weakness proved in
the end a source of strength. It was not to
foreigners, men said, that Henry owed his success
but to the arms of Englishmen. An English army
gathered round him, and as the hosts of Stephen
and the Duke drew together a battle seemed near
which would decide the fate of the realm. But
Theobald who was now firmly supported by the
greater barons again interfered and forced the
rivals to an agreement. To the excited partizans
of the house of Anjou it seemed as if the nobles
were simply playing their own game in the proposed
settlement and striving to preserve their power
by a balance of masters. The suspicion was
probably groundless, but all fear vanished with
the death of Eustace, who rode off from his father’s
camp, maddened with the ruin of his hopes, to die
in August, smitten, as men believed, by the hand
of God for his plunder of abbeys. The ground
was now clear, and in November the Treaty of
Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy.
The castles were to be razed, the crown lands
resumed, the foreign mercenaries banished from
the country, and sheriffs appointed to restore order.
Stephen was recognized as king, and in turn
recognized Henry as his heir. The duke received
at Oxford the fealty of the barons, and passed into
Normandy in the spring of 1154. The work of
reformation had already begun. Stephen resented

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indeed the pressure which Henry put on him to
enforce the destruction of the castles built during
the anarchy; but Stephen’s resistance was but the
pettish outbreak of a ruined man. He was in fact
fast drawing to the grave; and on his death in
October 1154 Henry returned to take the crown
without a blow.

Henry Fitz-Empress

Young as he was, and he had reached but his
twenty-first year when he returned to England as
its king, Henry mounted the throne with a
purpose of government which his reign carried
steadily out. His practical, serviceable frame
suited the hardest worker of his time. There was
something in his build and look, in the square stout
form, the fiery face, the close-cropped hair, the
prominent eyes, the bull neck, the coarse strong
hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen,
stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. “He never
sits down,” said one who observed him closely;
“he is always on his legs from morning till night.”
Orderly in business, careless of appearance, sparing
in diet, never resting or giving his servants rest,
chatty, inquisitive, endowed with a singular charm
of address and strength of memory, obstinate in
love or hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his

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general air that of a rough, passionate, busy man,
Henry’s personal character told directly on the
character of his reign. His accession marks the
period of amalgamation when neighbourhood and
traffic and intermarriage drew Englishmen and
Normans into a single people. A national feeling
was thus springing up before which the barriers of
the older feudalism were to be swept away. Henry
had even less reverence for the feudal past than
the men of his day: he was indeed utterly without
the imagination and reverence which enable men
to sympathize with any past at all. He had a
practical man’s impatience of the obstacles thrown
in the way of his reforms by the older constitution
of the realm, nor could he understand other men’s
reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements
by the sacrifice of customs and traditions of bygone
days. Without any theoretical hostility to the
co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a
perfectly reasonable and natural course to trample
either baronage or Church under foot to gain his
end of good government. He saw clearly that the
remedy for such anarchy as England had endured
under Stephen lay in the establishment of a kingly
rule unembarrassed by any privileges of order or
class, administered by royal servants, and in whose
public administration the nobles acted simply as
delegates of the sovereign. His work was to lie
in the organization of judicial and administrative
reforms which realized this idea. But of the

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currents of thought and feeling which were tending
in the same direction he knew nothing. What he
did for the moral and social impulses which were
telling on men about him was simply to let them
alone. Religion grew more and more identified
with patriotism under the eyes of a king who
whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books
during mass, who never confessed, and cursed
God in wild frenzies of blasphemy. Great peoples
formed themselves on both sides of the sea round
a sovereign who bent the whole force of his mind
to hold together an Empire which the growth of
nationality must inevitably destroy. There is
throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of
Henry’s position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth
century set in the midst of the twelfth, building up
by patience and policy and craft a dominion alien
to the deepest sympathies of his age and fated to
be swept away in the end by popular forces to
whose existence his very cleverness and activity
blinded him. But whether by the anti-national
temper of his general system or by the administrative
reforms of his English rule his policy did
more than that of all his predecessors to prepare
England for the unity and freedom which the fall
of his house was to reveal.

The Great Scutage

He had been placed on the throne, as we have
seen, by the Church. His first work was to repair
the evils which England had endured till his
accession by the restoration of the system of Henry

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the First; and it was with the aid and counsel of
Theobald that the foreign marauders were driven
from the realm, the new castles demolished in
spite of the opposition of the baronage, the King’s
Court and Exchequer restored. Age and infirmity
however warned the Primate to retire from the
post of minister, and his power fell into the
younger and more vigorous hands of Thomas
Beket, who had long acted as his confidential
adviser and was now made Chancellor. Thomas
won the personal favour of the king. The two
young men had, in Theobald’s words, “but one
heart and mind”; Henry jested in the Chancellor’s
hall, or tore his cloak from his shoulders in rough
horse-play as they rode through the streets. He
loaded his favourite with riches and honours, but
there is no ground for thinking that Thomas in
any degree influenced his system of rule. Henry’s
policy seems for good or evil to have been throughout
his own. His work of reorganization went
steadily on amidst troubles at home and abroad.
Welsh outbreaks forced him in 1157 to lead an
army over the border; and a crushing repulse
showed that he was less skilful as a general than
as a statesman. The next year saw him drawn
across the Channel, where he was already master
of a third of the present France. Anjou, Maine,
and Touraine he had inherited from his father,
Normandy from his mother, he governed Britanny
through his brother, while the seven provinces

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of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, La Marche,
Périgord, the Limousin, the Angoumois, and
Gascony, belonged to his wife. As Duchess of
Aquitaine Eleanor had claims on Toulouse, and
these Henry prepared in 1159 to enforce by arms.
But the campaign was turned to the profit of his
reforms. He had already begun the work of
bringing the baronage within the grasp of the law
by sending judges from the Exchequer year after
year to exact the royal dues and administer the
king’s justice even in castle and manor. He now
attacked its military influence. Each man who
held lands of a certain value was bound to furnish
a knight for his lord’s service; and the barons
thus held a body of trained soldiers at their
disposal. When Henry called his chief lords to
serve in the war of Toulouse, he allowed the lower
tenants to commute their service for sums payable
to the royal treasury under the name of “scutage,”
or shield-money. The “Great Scutage” did much
to disarm the baronage, while it enabled the king
to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.
Again however he was luckless in war. King
Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse.
Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide
dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest
with his suzerain; he withdrew his forces, and the
quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance and the
betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of
Lewis.

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Archbishop Thomas

Henry returned to his English realm to regulate
the relations of the State with the Church. These
rested in the main on the system established by
the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had
no wish to meddle. But he was resolute that,
baron or priest, all should be equal before the law;
and he had no more mercy for clerical than for
feudal immunities. The immunities of the clergy
indeed were becoming a hindrance to public justice.
The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended
far beyond the priesthood; it included in Henry’s
day the whole of the professional and educated
classes. It was subject to the jurisdiction of the
Church courts alone; but bodily punishment
could only be inflicted by officers of the lay courts,
and so great had the jealousy between clergy and
laity become that the bishops no longer sought
civil aid but restricted themselves to the purely
spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation
of orders. Such penalties formed no effectual
check upon crime, and while preserving the Church
courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted
offenders to secular punishment. For the carrying
out of these designs he sought an agent in Thomas
the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister
for eight years, and had fought bravely in the war
against Toulouse at the head of the seven hundred
knights who formed his household. But the king
had other work for him than war. On Theobald’s
death he forced on the monks of Canterbury his