The eighth century was in many ways a memorable one for Europe and Asia. In the east it was the period of the greatest splendour of the Caliphs of Baghdad; at Constantinople it saw the rule of the strong, stern iconoclastic emperors who set the spiritual authority of the popes at defiance; in Italy it beheld the downfall of Lombard rule, in Spain the subjection of nine-tenths of the country to the domination of the Moors.

Even more important than any of these events were the changes which were going forward in the wide regions subject to the dominion of the Franks. Here the star of the great Austrasian house, which was represented by Charles Martel, Pippin and Charlemagne, was steadily rising. In this century they shouldered aside the last feeble representative of the Merovingian race, and seated themselves visibly on that Frankish throne behind which they and their sires had stood so long as mayors of the palace; and in the end, aspiring yet higher, at the very end of the century the greatest of the race received the imperial crown and was hailed as Carolus Augustus by the people of Rome in the city of the Cæsars.

In this last series of events, as it happened, Englishmen self-exiled from their country took a prominent part. Willibrord, the apostle of the Frisians, baptised Pippin and foretold the exaltation of his house. Wynfrith, otherwise known as Boniface, following in his footsteps, persuaded or compelled Frisians, Thuringians and Hessians to embrace that religion which his own forefathers had accepted only three generations before, and with the religion induced them to accept also the ecclesiastical discipline of Rome. In his later missionary operations, gentle or forcible, he was strongly supported by the Austrasian Pippin, whom he repaid for that support by crowning him King of the Franks just half-way through the century. Moreover, it was another Englishman, the Northumbrian Alcuin, head of the great school for ecclesiastics attached to the church of York, who towards the close of the century accepted Charlemagne’s invitation to take up his abode at the Frankish court; became, so to speak, his literary prime minister, and being full himself of the memories of classical Rome, had no inconsiderable share in persuading his patron to revive the glories of the great world-empire, to pass from the condition of a mere King of the Franks into that of Roman Emperor.

Thus, in this eighth century the Anglo-Saxon race was in various ways making its mark on Europe; and in our own island its literary history during this period is not without interest; but politically the century is one of the most sterile in all our annals. It was an age of little men, of decaying faith, of slumberous inaction, or else of sanguinary and chaotic strife. Northumbria especially, during this period, was falling fast and far from her former high estate. Mercia and Wessex were engaged in perpetual objectless war, not ennobled by any great names or chivalrous deeds. Yet possibly even this dreary time was looked back upon in the next century as a golden age, for it was, almost till its close, unmarked by foreign invasion. In the year 793 a new and more disastrous chapter was opened by the appearance on the horizon of the ships of the Vikings.

The unsatisfactory character of this portion of English history is no doubt partly due to the fact that at an early stage we lose the guidance of that great writer to whom we are indebted for almost all that gives freshness and life to the preceding narratives. Bede, the father of English history, finished his great work in 731, and died four years later, in 735. Hitherto he has been speaking to us about the lives of other men; it is now time to listen to what his disciples have told us concerning his own. Born about the year 672, soon after the death of Oswy, Bede was taken as a child of seven years old to the newly founded monastery of Monkwearmouth, and there or in the sister monastery of Jarrow he passed the rest of his life. He was thus not only the child of the convent but in a pre-eminent degree the spiritual heir of Benedict Biscop, the nobly born and cultured Northumbrian, who had founded these two monasteries, had built in their precincts two stately stone churches “after the manner of the Romans which he always loved” (far superior doubtless to the uncouth wooden churches which satisfied most of the Anglo-Saxon builders), had enriched their libraries with precious manuscripts and pictures—the trophies of five journeys to Rome—and had imported artisans from Gaul to teach the Anglo-Saxon the hitherto unknown mystery of the manufacture of glass. It is an interesting fact that of both these two foundations of Benedict Biscop some vestiges still remain, almost unique specimens of early Anglo-Saxon art. In the porch of the parish church of Monkwearmouth are some cylindrical “baluster-shafts,” and some slabs covered with beautiful Anglo-Saxon knot-work. In the parish church of Jarrow, surrounded as it now is by smoking furnaces and clanging steam-hammers, there are portions of a wall undoubtedly anterior to the Norman conquest, and possibly belonging to the very fabric which, as an inscription tells us, was dedicated in the fifteenth year of king Egfrid and the fourth year of abbot Ceolfrid (probably 685). Under this abbot, who ruled Wearmouth as well as Jarrow, Bede spent more than thirty years of his life, the years of boyhood, youth and early middle age. With him, according to the pathetic story already related, he probably sustained as a boy of fourteen the whole burden of chanting the antiphones, when all the rest of the choir were laid low by the terrible pestilence. By him doubtless his studies were directed in later life, when as a studious youth he entered the convent library and began to pore over the manuscripts, sacred and profane, the splendid copies of the Vulgate, the treatises of the Fathers, the poems of Lucretius, Horace, Ovid and Virgil, wherewith the literary enthusiasm of Benedict had enriched his monastery.

In 716 the abbot Ceolfrid, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, resigned his office and started on a pilgrimage to Rome. He travelled slowly, and had only reached the city of Langres in Champagne, when the weakness of age conquered him, and he lay down and died. His attempted pilgrimage has, however, a special interest for us, since it has recently been discovered that one of the manuscripts which he took with him on his journey as an offering to the Holy Father was none other than the celebrated Codex Amiatinus, now preserved in the Laurentian Library, at Florence and, by the admission of all scholars, the chief authority for the text of Jerome’s great translation of the Scriptures.

Bede survived his old preceptor nearly twenty years, following up with patient industry the literary career upon which Ceolfrid had started him. In 731 he completed the great work on The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which has made his name immortal; but besides this he wrote a vast number of treatises: on The Interpretation of Scripture, on The Nature of Things, on Grammar and on Astronomy, and two chronological works entitled De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione. His books show an especial interest in the computation of time, the natural result of his study of the great Easter controversy, the echoes of which must have been still resounding in the days of his childhood. He was unquestionably the most learned man of his age, perhaps one might safely say the most learned man of the early Middle Ages. He was—what even the great Pope Gregory was not—a Greek scholar; and his Latin style, formed doubtless on a careful study of the classical authors in the library of the convent, is eminently pure, and free from turgidity and affectation. His history, in fact, comes as a delightful surprise to the student who has had to struggle with the barbarous Latinity of papal epistles, or the astounding grammatical blunders of Bede’s Frankish counterpart, Gregory of Tours. All this intellectual attainment on the part of the monk of Jarrow is the more surprising when we remember how short was the interval which separated him from actual barbarism. Bede’s father possibly, his grandfather almost certainly, were rude illiterate pagans; yet we find their near descendant writing Latin which might almost have passed muster at the court of Augustus, and by his saintly life and happy death illustrating the noblest qualities of the Christian character.

Bede’s life ended on May 9, 735. Though the story of his death is one of the best known in English history, it may hardly be omitted here. For some months before the end he had suffered much from difficulty of breathing. The long and weary night watches were gladdened with psalmody; sometimes with the repetition of his own Anglo-Saxon verses, one of which may be thus translated:—

He wept with his weeping disciples; then he changed to rejoicing and gave thanks to God for all, even for his chastisements. “As Ambrose said, so can I say, too, ‘I have not so lived that I need be ashamed to abide longer with you; yet neither do I fear to die, for we have a good Lord’.” In the intervals of sacred song he continued his literary labours, dictating to a youth by his bedside a translation of the early chapters of John’s gospel, together with some extracts from a treatise by Isidore of Seville. This latter was probably one of the Spanish bishop’s scientific works, for Bede said: “I do not want my lads to read that which is false, nor that after my death they should spend fruitless labour on this thing”. The amanuensis said, “There is yet one chapter of the book which thou art dictating, but I think it too hard work for thee”; but Bede answered, “No, it is easy; take thy pen and write speedily”. When the dictation was all-but ended, he distributed his little treasures, spices, napkins and incense, among his friends in the monastery. Then said the scribe, “There is yet one more sentence not written down”. This was dictated. The scribe said, “It is done”. “Thou hast said truly,” answered Bede. “It is finished. Help me to sit in yonder place where I have been wont to pray, that sitting there I may call upon the name of the Father.” And thus, seated on the pavement of his cell and chanting with laboured breath the Gloria Patri, the father of English history passed away.

In connexion with the name of Bede, allusion must be made to one or two of his contemporaries who made this period illustrious in the history of English literature. The herdsman-poet Caedmon has already been mentioned in connexion with the conference at Whitby. The date of his death is not recorded, but it probably occurred before the close of the seventh century. Though recent criticism has thrown some doubt on his authorship of the poems which were formerly attributed to him, there can be no doubt that his was a great name in the young literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, and if Bede, though writing in Latin, may be considered as standing by the fountain-head of English prose, Caedmon must be allowed to hold the same place in relation to English poetry.

Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and first bishop of Sherborne, was probably considered by his contemporaries the greatest scholar of his age. Like so many of the great ecclesiastics of this period, Aldhelm was of noble birth, a kinsman, said some, of King Ine himself. Trained in the monastic school of Hadrian at Canterbury he imbibed from his Italian instructors a large amount of classical learning, but not that purity of taste which caused his younger contemporary Bede to use his learning with discretion. Whatever may have been his literary failings, there was a fascination about his personal presence and an earnestness in his religious character which won for him a large number of loyal disciples, enabled him to develop the little community gathered by an Irish saint into the famous monastery of Malmesbury, and made him the literary apostle of Wessex. According to his great panegyrist, William of Malmesbury, he combined in his style the excellencies of various nations. Some fastidious readers in the twelfth century found his works heavy reading. “Unreasonable judges are they,” said William, “who do not know that every nation has its own different style of writing. For the Greeks write in an involved style, the Latins in a guarded one, the Gauls write with splendour, the English with pomp.... But if you will carefully read Aldhelm’s writings you will think him a Greek by the acuteness of his intellect, a Roman by his brilliancy, and an Englishman by his pomp.” The “pomposity,” or in other words, the turgidity of his style has been found quite intolerable by later scholars, but was probably considered an enviable gift by his countrymen, only just emerged from barbarism. At any rate even to the pompous and somewhat pedantic churchman much may be pardoned in consideration of the charming anecdote, related on the authority of King Alfred, that Aldhelm in his younger days seeing the “semi-barbarous” people accustomed, as soon as Mass was finished, to stream away to their houses without listening to the words of the preacher, took his station on the bridge by which they needs must pass and there sang merry ballads of his own composition, till he had gained the ear of the hurrying crowd, after which he changed his tune, gradually interwove with his song the words of Scripture, began to speak to them of serious things, and, in short, won back to sanity and devotion the citizens whom he might vainly have endeavoured to coerce by the terrors of excommunication. Aldhelm was chosen Bishop of Sherborne in 705 and died in 709.

The names just mentioned are those of men of a somewhat earlier generation than Bede, and belong, in fact, rather to the seventh century than to the eighth. Not so with the last upon our list, Cynewulf, who was born not many years before the death of Bede and whose literary activity was displayed in the latter half of the eighth century. We have in this poet a remarkable instance of a man whose very existence had been forgotten by his countrymen, and whose name, till a few years ago, was absent from the most carefully written histories of our literature. In the year 1857, however, a German professor110 discovered Cynewulf’s name in a charade prefixed to a collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles. The clue thus followed led to other discoveries, and now by the general consent of scholars many poems formerly attributed to Caedmon are reclaimed for his fellow-Northumbrian Cynewulf. The Riddles which are sometimes attributed to this poet are considered by those who have studied them to show, amid much misplaced ingenuity, considerable sensitiveness to the beauties of Nature, and some power of description of the battle and the banquet. It is interesting to observe how rapidly in these early Middle Ages a literary fashion spread from country to country over the whole west of Europe. Almost at the same time when the Northumbrian poet was composing his curious poetical riddles, Paul the Lombard and Peter of Pisa were discharging at one another acrostic riddles and enigmatic charades at the court of Charlemagne.

The most important of all the poems which have been conjecturally assigned to this author is the beautiful “Vision of the Holy Rood,” some lines of which are carved upon the Ruthwell Cross still existing in Dumfriesshire. In this poem the author describes the appearance to him in a dream of the holy wood which had once been a tree in the forest, and was then cut down and fashioned into a cross for the punishment of criminals, but received with awe upon its arms the sacred body of the Lord of mankind. The Rood speaks:—

The death, the burial and the resurrection of the Lord are related in a similar strain of reverent compassion for the Almighty Sufferer, and the Rood finally charges the poet to reveal the vision to all men, inasmuch as the day is coming when Christ will ask who there is that for His name will taste of bitter death as He did on the cross.

There is something which must needs move our sympathy when we see the passion of pitying love with which these simple-hearted sons of warriors received the story of the suffering Saviour. But, as has been already said, the tide of religious emotion which had flowed so freely in the seventh was already beginning to ebb in the eighth century. This decay of religious life in England, or at any rate in Northumbria, is vouched for in the memorable letter which Bede wrote shortly before his death to his friend Egbert, who had just been consecrated bishop and was shortly to become Archbishop of York. The letter itself is a model of wise exhortation, boldly but respectfully tendered by an aged saint to a man, his junior in years but his superior in ecclesiastical rank. Bede is evidently sure of the goodness of his pupil’s intentions, but anxious lest he should not have sufficient force of character to make head against the corruption of the times. Ever since the death of King Aldfrid, which happened thirty years before (705), the decline in morals had gone on at a rapid pace. He holds the bishops largely responsible for this degeneracy. They have insisted on retaining dioceses larger than any one man could possibly administer. They have, for filthy lucre, given their consent to all sorts of grants which should never have been made. They and their clergy have clutched eagerly at the shepherd’s hire, leaving the flock unfed. “There are, as we hear, many farms and villages on lonely mountains or in brambly wildernesses, in which for many years the face of a priest has never been seen, and neither baptisms nor confirmations are ever performed, and yet not one of the dwellers in such places is ever allowed to escape from the payment of church-dues.”

But the greatest scandal of all in Bede’s day seems to have been the foundation of pseudo-monasteries by noble and wealthy laymen, who intended anything rather than the leading of a life of religious austerity. Intent apparently on securing the creature-comforts which a well-endowed monastery afforded; intent also on escaping under the pretence of a religious life the duties of military service for their king and country, these pseudo-abbots would obtain a large grant of land from the king, and would there rear their unholy convents, in which, freed from all laws, human or divine, they would live their lives of licentious ease, waited on by troops of menial monks, who had generally been themselves expelled from genuine monasteries, by reason of their irregular lives. Nay, sometimes these impostors would go even further, and persuade a foolish king to grant them a piece of land adjoining the first donation, and would there erect a nunnery in which their wives might, without taking any regular vows, pretend to be the guides and rulers of maidens vowed to Christ.

These abuses had gone so far that the service of the state was seriously impaired thereby. The lavish grants of land, both to the genuine and the sham monasteries, had so impoverished the king that he had no reserve land, from which to reward the sons of his thegns or poor soldiers who had served him well in war. Hence these young men either sped across the seas to countries which held out the hope of a better career, or, being unable to marry, abandoned themselves to illicit love and sank down into the lowest depths of sloth and immorality. Bede’s recommendation was that as there were so many of these places which were profitable neither to God nor man, with no true service to God performed in them, and quite useless for the defence of the realm, they, or at any rate one of them, should be seized and converted into the seat of a new and much-needed bishopric. Such a deed, far from being blamable as sacrilege, would deserve the praise due to a most virtuous action. Subjection of all monasteries to some external supervision and control; the suppression of as many as possible of those nests of hypocrisy and vice, the sham monasteries; and the formation of many new bishoprics—these were the remedial measures which lay nearest to the heart of Bede. Whether Archbishop Egbert, a noble and pure-minded man, friend of one king (Ceolwulf) and brother of another (Eadbert), was able to carry into effect any of Bede’s reforms it is impossible to say; but the subsequent course of Anglo-Saxon history seems to point to a negative conclusion. It was, perhaps, partly in these paradises of sin, in the pseudo-monasteries of England, that the virility of the nation was sapped and the way prepared for so many a miserable surrender to the Danish invaders.

In the general decline of morals during the eighth century Northumbria was especially conspicuous, if we may draw any conclusion from its political history. In the course of that century fifteen kings swayed the sceptre, and of these, five were deposed, five murdered, two voluntarily abdicated the throne. It is no wonder that Northumbria, once so glorious, now became the basest of the kingdoms; that Charlemagne, on hearing of one of these murders, called the Northumbrian Angles “a perfidious and perverse nation, worse than the pagans, murderers of their lords”; or that the northern kingdom was found utterly unable to cope with the storm of Danish invasion when it beat upon its shores. It would serve no good purpose to give the names and dates of accession of all these kings, most of whom are to us mere names in an arid chronicle, but we may single out for special notice two who reigned in the first half of the century, Ceolwulf and Eadbert.

Ceolwulf, a descendant of Ida but not of Oswald’s line, in the words of William of Malmesbury “mounted the trembling summit of the kingdom” in the year 729. He is memorable for us as the friend of Bede and the sovereign to whom he showed and dedicated his Ecclesiastical History; and for his liberality to the Church he was looked upon with much favour by ecclesiastics. But the throne did not cease to tremble when he ascended it. In 731 he was taken prisoner, no doubt, by some of his rebellious subjects, was forcibly tonsured and consigned to a monastery. He was, however, soon restored to his kingdom and reigned, it would seem, with comparative tranquillity for six years, during which time he must have received and may have read the Ecclesiastical History. In 737 “thinking it contrary to the gravity of the Christian character to be immersed in worldly affairs,” he abdicated the kingdom and became a monk at Lindisfarne. The abdication and the monastic profession were this time probably voluntary. The rare sanctity which he displayed in the convent procured for him the honour of burial near the tomb of St. Cuthbert and miracles were believed to be wrought at his grave.

The chosen successor of Ceolwulf was his cousin Eadbert (737–58), a strong and strenuous ruler who once more pushed the Northumbrian border far into Scotland, adding a part of Ayrshire to his dominions, and so impressing the surrounding states with the terror of his name that the Angles of Mercia, the Picts, the Scots and the Britons of Strathclyde, all remained at peace with him during the greater part of his reign and delighted to do him honour. By a combination of circumstances, probably unique in English history, the brother of this powerful king was Egbert, archbishop of York (734–66), the prelate to whom Bede addressed the letter of counsel just quoted. Egbert’s tenure of the see was in itself memorable. He was the first occupant of that see after Paulinus to hold the rank of archbishop and to receive his pallium from the pope. He did for the church library at York what Benedict had done for Jarrow and Wearmouth, obtaining for it large stores of precious manuscripts and laying the foundation of that great ecclesiastical school the glory of which culminated in Alcuin. As for his brother, King Eadbert, his fame spread far and wide, and in him the glory of Oswald and of Oswy seemed about to be revived. But towards the close of his reign his fortune changed. In the year 756, when he had been nineteen years on the throne, he, in alliance with the King of the Picts, led an army against the strong city of Alclyde, the modern Dumbarton, which was the capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde. The allied operations were at first successful. Alcuith surrendered on August 1, but only nine days later almost the whole of Eadbert’s army perished in its march through Perthshire. We have no hint of the cause of the disaster, but we may, if we like, imagine a well-planned ambuscade in some Perthshire glen, an anticipation by nearly a thousand years of the battle of Killiecrankie.

Was it depression of spirits at this lamentable change in his fortunes, or was it merely that weariness of reigning which overcame so many Anglian kings, that drove Eadbert into the monastery? In the twenty-first year of his reign, notwithstanding the earnest dissuasion of his neighbour-kings, some of whom, we are told, offered to add part of their realms to his if he would continue to reign, Eadbert, “for the love of God, and desiring to take the heavenly country by storm, received on his head St. Peter’s tonsure,” and handed over his kingdom to his son Oswulf. He continued in his religious seclusion for ten years till his death in 768, and was buried at York in the same porticus of the church which held his brother, the archbishop, who had died two years before him. There is some reason to suppose that after the unfortunate issue of Eadbert’s campaign in 756, the border of Bernicia being withdrawn a long way to the south, the capital of that kingdom was transferred from Bamburgh to Corbridge in the valley of the Tyne, some seventy miles south-west of Bamburgh. Corbridge was the Corstopitum of the Romans, a station on the northern Watling Street, and still shows some interesting relics of Roman occupation. About the same time we find indications that Cataractonium, now Catterick, the most northerly Roman station within the limits of Yorkshire, became a royal residence, perhaps as a supplemental palace to that at Eburacum. Thus we see that even four centuries after the departure of the legions the charm of Roman civilisation still lingered round the places where they had dwelt, though these are represented in our own day by villages whose very names are obscure except to antiquaries.

In the latter half of the century the lawful line of Northumbrian kings, the sons of Ida, was frequently broken by usurpers of unknown lineage, chief among whom were a certain Ethelwald Moll and his son Ethelred. The latter, an impiissimus rex, in the language of the chronicler, reigned from 774 to 779, was expelled in the latter year, and returned in 790 to wreak vengeance on the princes of the lawful line. The two sons of his predecessor, when apparently little more than children, were lured from their sanctuary in the cathedral at York by promises of safety and protection, and were drowned in Windermere by order of the usurper. Their cousin Osred, who had for a short time worn the crown, was similarly enticed from the Isle of Man, captured and slain. Ethelred sought to strengthen himself by an alliance with Offa, the powerful King of Mercia, whose daughter Elfleda he married at Catterick in 792, the year of Osred’s murder. But for all his precautions he could not escape the usual fate of Northumbrian kings. In 796 he was slain “by his own people” at Corbridge.

The man who sat upon “the trembling throne” at the end of the century was a certain ealdorman named Eardulf, who six years before his accession had had a narrow and, as some men thought, miraculous escape from death. The tyrant Ethelred, whose anger he had somehow incurred, ordered him to be executed outside the gates of the monastery of Ripon. The monks with solemn chants bore his body to the church for burial and left it for the night at the lych-gate. There soon after midnight some faithful follower found him still alive and helped him to escape. His resurrection seems to have been concealed from Ethelred, and, as has been said, the year 800 found him reigning as king over Northumbria.

From Northumbria we turn to the central kingdom of Mercia. The eighth century was the time of the greatest glory of that kingdom, and for many years it seemed as if from that quarter rather than from Wessex would come the needed consolidation of England; as if Lichfield, rather than Winchester or even London, might be the destined capital of the country. It was chiefly under two kings, Ethelbald and Offa, whose united reigns occupied eighty years (from 716 to 796), that Mercia attained this high position. Penda’s grandson, Ceolred, King of Mercia, died insane in 716, being thus punished, according to St. Boniface, for the sins which he had committed in defrauding the Church of her possessions and making the vowed virgins of her convents minister to his lusts. He was succeeded by a remote relation, Ethelbald, who was not a lineal descendant of Penda, and whom, jealous of his great qualities, Ceolred had driven forth from his court. In his fugitive wanderings Ethelbald had visited more than once the far-famed sanctuary of Crowland,111 where amidst the vast fens of Lincoln and Cambridgeshire, dotted over with desolate forest-islands, the holy man Guthlac, the Cuthbert of Mercia, had made for himself a hermit’s retreat, and, with only two servants for his companions in that infinite loneliness, had practised austerities surpassing those of the hermits of the Thebaid. Guthlac had the usual experiences of the fever-stricken solitary, being assailed at night by demons with great heads, hideous faces, long horse-like teeth and horrible harsh voices, which croaked forth temptation, in the language not of the Angle but of the Briton. This sorely buffeted but eminently holy man, who died in 714 at the age of forty-one, and whose life in the wilderness lasted only fifteen years, had during that term acquired great renown as a saint. His fame spread far and wide through Mercia, and people of all ranks flocked to him for healing or for counsel. Among these was the outcast Ethelbald, to whom Guthlac predicted that he should soon without strife possess the Mercian throne, a prophecy which was shortly fulfilled when his cousin and enemy was stricken with madness, while sitting at the banquet with his gesiths all round him.

Ethelbald swayed the sceptre of Mercia for forty-one years (716–57). He was evidently a strong and strenuous, if somewhat unscrupulous ruler. In the early part of his reign he had so completely cowed Wessex and conquered the other four southern kingdoms, that Bede, writing the concluding paragraphs of his history in 731, could say: “All the southern provinces up to the boundary of the Humber, with their respective kings, are subject to Ethelbald, King of the Mercians”. In 733 we find him capturing Somerton, the chief town of the Sumorsaetas; in 740 he turns his arms northwards and takes advantage of Eadbert’s absence on his Pictish campaign to ravage Northumbria. But in his last years fortune frowned upon him. In 750 Cuthred II., King of Wessex, apparently an active and valiant man, rose in rebellion, and in 752 won a great victory over Ethelbald at Burford on the slopes of the Cotswolds, putting him to ignominious flight. Never apparently did Mercia recover the supremacy over Wessex which she lost on that battlefield, and in 757 Ethelbald, who must have been an unpopular master of his household, perished by a night attack of his own guards. Notwithstanding his early friendship for St. Guthlac, Ethelbald was not a pious nor even a moral king. There is preserved a remarkable letter addressed to him by St. Boniface,112 in which the apostle of Germany, while praising the vigour and justice of his government, rebukes him for his outrageous profligacy, and expresses his fear that some great national judgment, like the Moorish conquest of Spain, will fall upon the kings and peoples of England for their luxury and immorality—a remarkable prophecy, as it must have seemed to later generations, of the Danish ravages.

After a short interval of unrest the Mercian throne was filled by Offa, a distant relation of Ethelbald, who reigned for nearly forty years (757–96), and who in some ways seems to deserve the title of the greatest of Mercian kings. The everlasting contest with Wessex was renewed, and Offa’s victory at Bensington in Oxfordshire (779) did something towards obliterating the disgrace of Burford and probably gave what is now the county of Oxford to the middle kingdom. From various causes Offa had now acquired so great a predominance that he was able to carry into effect a change in the ecclesiastical geography of England which was little less than a revolution. This was the creation of a new archbishopric for the Midlands. We may imagine that he reasoned in this wise: “Northumbria has now its archbishopric at York. The archbishop of Canterbury is too much overshadowed by the greatness of my rival of Wessex. Why should not I, the most powerful king in Britain, have an archbishop of my own here in Mercia?” This reasoning prevailed. In 787 a synod, ever after known as “the contentious synod,” was held at Chelsea, and thereat, we are told, seven out of the twelve dioceses of the southern province were placed under the archbishop of Lichfield, being rent away from their dependence on Canterbury. The meaning of this change is obvious. There were now three great English kingdoms: Northumbria, Wessex and Mercia, and three corresponding archbishoprics, York, Lichfield and Canterbury. The Thames was the boundary between the central and southern provinces, except that Essex with Middlesex was included in the latter. East Anglia was evidently, in ecclesiastical matters as well as in things political, subject to Mercia, a fact which accounts for the abrupt entry in the Chronicle for 792113 (794): “Offa, King of the Mercians, ordered the head of Ethelbert, King [of the East Angles], to be struck off”. The new ecclesiastical arrangement lasted for only sixteen years. In 803 Offa’s successor Cenwulf voluntarily restored all the metropolitan rights of the see of Canterbury.

There is one still existing memorial by which the name of Offa yet survives in the mouths of men. This is Offa’s Dyke (called by the Welsh Clawdd Offa), a great earthen rampart flanked by a ditch, which ran from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye, a distance of some 130 miles, and divided the territories of the Mercians from those of the Welsh. For a considerable portion of its course this rampart is still visible, in some places only as a low bank but in others showing a height of 30 feet to the summit of the mound from the bottom of the ditch on its western side. It nearly corresponds with the present boundary between England and Wales, except that it cuts off from England a portion of Hereford and the whole of Monmouth. In part of its course it is duplicated by another embankment called Wat’s Dyke, about three miles to the east of it, and this work also, in the belief of some antiquaries, belongs to the age of Offa. Though we are distinctly told, on good authority, that the object of this huge work was military defence, it is probable that, like the Vallum in Northumberland and the Pfahlgraben in Germany, it was also a geographical boundary, and served a useful purpose in time of peace, as marking the limit of two rival jurisdictions and clearly indicating to which of them pertained the duty of punishing robbery or murder committed on either side of the border. This dyke probably commemorates the result of the “Devastation of the southern Britons wrought by Offa” which is noted by the Cambrian Annals under the years 778 and 784; and the effect of these campaigns seems to have been to push back the Welsh frontier from the Severn to the Wye—no unimportant augmentation of the Mercian kingdom.

The diplomatic correspondence of the period shows us how large loomed the figure of Offa in the eyes of his contemporaries. Pope Hadrian I. in writing to Charlemagne calls him absolutely “rex Anglorum,” and at the same time earnestly expresses his disbelief in a rumour which had reached his ears that the two kings of the Franks and the Angles were plotting his own deposition from the papacy, and the appointment of a Frankish ecclesiastic in his place. This, however, was probably an idle rumour, set afloat by some of Hadrian’s enemies in order to work upon the fears of the elderly pontiff. Offa, himself, seems to have received the legates of the Holy See with reverence and to have availed himself of their help in regulating the affairs of his new archbishopric. Moreover, he ordained, probably as a thank-offering for the papal assistance in this matter, that his kingdom should send a yearly offering of 365 mancuses (about £130), one for each day in the year, to the holy see.

There were, however, some difficulties connected with the frequent English pilgrimages to Rome; too frequent according to Alcuin for the good repute of the Anglo-Saxon dames who engaged in them; and too frequent, as the tax collectors of Charles the Great considered, by reason of the number of merchants who, under the guise of holiness, transacted a profitable business in the transport of specie and merchandise. These difficulties were, however, set right by a friendly letter from Charles to the effect that true pilgrims should receive all due protection from him, but that merchants masquerading as pilgrims must pay the regular customs dues. This letter, written in 796, was accompanied by the present of a belt, a Hunnish sword and two silken vestments, part of the huge spoil taken in the previous year from the robber hold of the Avars. It seems to have healed an old estrangement between the two kings dating from 789, the result of the failure of matrimonial negotiations between them. Charles had solicited the hand of Offa’s daughter for his son and namesake, and Offa had been willing to consent, on condition that Charles’s daughter, Bertha, should become the bride of his son, Ecgferth. On this point, however, the negotiations broke down, owing to Charles’s well-known reluctance to part with any of his daughters. For a short time the relations between the two kingdoms were sorely strained, and decrees forbidding the entrance of merchants were issued by either angry sovereign, but gradually the dispute died down, perhaps partly owing to the mediation of Alcuin, who was English by birth and loyal to his English friends, but Frank by adoption and a true subject to Charles. At last, as we have seen, all wounds were healed by the application of an Avar baldric, a sword and two mantles.

Offa died in 796, and his son and successor Ecgferth followed him to the grave in four months. This untimely death of a young and hopeful prince was, according to monastic writers, a punishment for the many crimes of his father, especially for the execution of the East Anglian Ethelbert. Cenwulf, who succeeded to the Mercian throne, was not of Offa’s line, though like him a collateral descendant of Penda. Of his reign, which lasted well on into the ninth century (796–821), nothing need here be said, save that in its third year he invaded Kent, which had revolted from his rule and set up a rival king named Edbert Pren, possibly a descendant of the old Kentish line. Edbert was defeated and taken prisoner by the soldiers of Offa, who, after cutting out his tongue and chopping off his hands, sent him as a prisoner into Mercia. With all its vaunted prosperity, the central kingdom does not seem to have made great progress in civilisation since the days of Penda.

Save for some conflicts with Wales, in which the Cymri appear generally to have been worsted, the history of the West Saxon kingdom in the eighth century consisted chiefly of that protracted struggle with Mercia which has been briefly sketched in the foregoing pages. But the story of the death of Cynewulf in 786 is told in the Chronicle with such vividness and in such detail that an attempt must be made to reproduce it here. Cynewulf, a kinsman of the victorious Cuthred, had expelled that king’s successor, Sigebert, and driven him into exile. After thirty years of reigning, Cynewulf had to meet the face of the avenger, Sigebert’s brother, Cyneheard, who is called in the Chronicle “the Etheling”. Learning that the king, slenderly guarded, was visiting a woman at Merton, Cyneheard with a band of his gesiths surrounded the house and rode through the gate of the great courtyard to the door of the lady’s bower. Surprised and unable to summon his guards, the king rushed to the door, and in the narrow entrance defended himself bravely and with success till he caught sight of the Etheling. Then with a sudden burst of rage he dashed forward, sorely wounded his enemy, but was himself surrounded and slain by Cyneheard’s men. Meantime the lady’s cries aroused the king’s thegns who were in the great hall, ignorant of what had happened, and they hastened to the scene of tumult, each running as fast as he could. The Etheling, who had no quarrel with them, offered them quarter and money in return for peace, but they refused his terms and continued fighting, outnumbered as they were, till they were all slain but one man, “and he,” says the chronicler apologetically, “was [only] a Welshman, a hostage and already sorely wounded”.

Next morning, when the main body of the king’s thegns, whom he had left behind when he rode to Merton, heard what had happened, they galloped to the house, headed by the Ealdorman Osric, but found the Etheling in possession and the gate of the courtyard closed against them. A parley was called, and Cyneheard offered the new-comers their own terms in money and land if they would join his party and win for him the kingdom, adding with uncomprehended irony: “There are kinsmen of yours now with me in the house, and they, I know, will never leave me”. “No kinsman,” answered the thegns, “can be dearer to us than our lord, and we will never follow his murderer.” The offer of quarter which they in turn made to the Etheling’s gesiths was rejected with equal scorn. “We care no more for your offer,” said they, “than did your comrades for ours, and they”—now at last the truth came out—“were all slain with the king.” Then followed fierce fighting round the gates, till at last the king’s thegns, who were the stronger party, forced their way in and slew the Etheling and all the men with him, save one who had already received many wounds and was godson to Ealdorman Osric by whom his life was preserved. Once again we note the unshakable fidelity of the “comrades” to their lord.

On the death of Cynewulf, Beorhtric (786–802), a distant kinsman, succeeded to the West Saxon throne. Royal genealogies were by this time in much confusion, and all that the chronicler could say concerning his descent was that “his right father’s kin goeth unto Cerdic”. Beorhtric’s reign, in itself unimportant, is chiefly interesting to us by reason of a certain competitor, for the time an unsuccessful competitor, for the crown. This was none other than a young man named Egbert, who, it was said, could trace his line back through a brother of King Ine to Ceawlin and so to Cerdic. His father, Ealhmund, had been under-king of Kent, whether under Mercia or Wessex it would be difficult to say; indeed the whole of Egbert’s early career is veiled in obscurity. All that seems to be certain is that he had pretensions of some kind to the kingship of Wessex, which made him obnoxious to Beorhtric and forced him to seek shelter at the Mercian court. Thence, however, he was driven in 789 when Beorhtric obtained in marriage the hand of Offa’s daughter, Eadburh. Ethelred of Northumbria having soon after married another daughter of the same house, there was evidently no safe resting-place in England for the fugitive prince, who betook himself to the court of Charles the Great and there abode for thirteen years till the death of his rival. In 802, Beorhtric died, and Egbert, returning to England, seems to have been without opposition raised to the West Saxon throne.

According to Asser, the biographer of Alfred the Great, the death of Beorhtric was due to his wife. That daughter of Offa, if Asser may be trusted, as soon as she had established her influence in the West Saxon palace, “began in her father’s manner to act tyrannically”. She undermined to the utmost of her power the king’s best counsellors by slandering them to her husband, and those whom she could not thus displace she removed by poison. A draught of poison which she had thus prepared for a young man greatly beloved by Beorhtric was inadvertently tasted by the king and caused his death, which of course involved Eadburh’s downfall. Carrying with her great hoards of treasure, she sought the Frankish court where her husband’s rival, Egbert, had so lately been sheltered. As she stood in the hall of audience and offered rich presents to the emperor, Charles said to her, perhaps in jest: “Choose, Eadburh, which you will have, me or my son who stands here with me under the dais”. She thoughtlessly answered: “If I may really have my choice, I choose your son, inasmuch as he is the younger of the two”. Whereupon Charles answered with a smile: “If you had chosen me, you should have had my son, but now since you have chosen him you shall have neither”. An improbable story truly, but one which shows the sort of legend which already ere the end of the ninth century was springing up around the name of Charlemagne. Eadburh, however, received from the emperor the gift of a great abbey which she ruled for some time. Then, being convicted of unchastity, she was expelled from the convent, wandered over Europe, begging her daily bread, and died at last in misery at Pavia. Such was the end of the daughter of the mighty Offa. So detestable, says Asser, was the memory of Eadburh’s crimes that for generations the West Saxons would not allow the wife of one of their kings to be called queen, but would only allow her the title of consort.