Ælfred’s successor, Eadward the Elder, completed the work which Ecgberht had begun, by first extending the supremacy of Wessex over the whole island of Britain. |Reigns of his sons. 925–955.| Under his sons, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadred, that supremacy was maintained and consolidated at the point |Reign of Eadgar. 958–975.| of the sword. His grandson, Eadgar the Peaceful, enjoyed the fruit of their labours, and further strengthened their work by a reign of strong and orderly government, by holding himself in constant readiness for war during a time, for those days, of most unusual peace. Thus, from |800–975.| Ecgberht to Eadgar, it took a hundred and seventy years to build up the Kingdom of England, a kingdom which, as coming events showed, could still be conquered, but which could no longer be permanently divided. The twenty-five years of Eadward are the turning-point; what he won his successors had only to keep. It is only |Importance of the reign of Eadward.| the unequalled glory of his father which has doomed this prince, one of the greatest rulers that England ever beheld, to a smaller degree of popular fame than he deserves. His whole reign bears out the panegyric passed on him by an ancient writer,^[59] that he was fully his father’s equal as a warrior and ruler, and was inferior to him in nothing except those literary labours which were so peculiarly Ælfred’s own. The work of Eadward was twofold; he enlarged the borders of his immediate kingdom, and he brought the whole island under vassalage. His wars, and those of his three successors, were, it should be remembered, waged mainly against the Danes settled in Britain. These settlers were sometimes helped by their brethren from Denmark, and more commonly by the Danes and Northmen settled in Ireland; but, on the whole, foreign invasions do not form an important feature in the |Alliance of Æthelwald with the Danes. 901–905.| events of this half century. The war began when the Northumbrian Danes took the part of a defeated candidate for the West-Saxon crown,^[60] who did not scruple to accept their alliance, and to lead them to plunder and attempted conquest against his own countrymen. But Eadward, when thus put on the defensive, did something more than merely defend the kingdom which he had received |Recovery of Mercia, &c. by Eadward and Æthelflæd. 905–922.| from his father. With the help of his sister Æthelflæd, the famous Lady of the Mercians, the widow of their Ealdorman Æthelred, he recovered from the Danish yoke the whole of Mercia, East-Anglia, and Essex, and the brother and sister secured their conquests by building |Annexation of Mercia. 922.| fortresses in all directions. By the English population of all these districts Eadward was welcomed as a deliverer, and he found no difficulty in annexing the liberated lands to his own kingdom. After the death of Æthelflæd, who was her brother’s close ally rather than his subject, the separate being of Mercia came to an end. The whole Mercian land on both sides of the Watling-Street was |Eadward’s kingdom extended to the Humber.| incorporated by Eadward with his own kingdom. He thus became, what no West-Saxon King had been before him, immediate sovereign of all England south of the Humber. Having thus extended his immediate dominion beyond all precedent, he was able to extend his more general supremacy equally beyond anything possessed by |All the Princes of Britain submit to him. 922–924.| his predecessors. The princes of Wales, Northumberland, Strathclyde, and Scotland, all submitted to him by a voluntary act; “they chose him to father and to lord.”^[61] The Welsh and Northumbrian princes only renewed a homage which they had already paid both to Ecgberht and to Ælfred; but the relation with Strathclyde and Scotland was new. No warfare with either country is spoken of; the act of submission seems to have been made by the free consent of the rulers and people of the two |Probable causes of their voluntary submission.| Northern kingdoms. The motive to such an act is doubtless to be found in a dread of Eadward’s power, combined with a sense of the necessity of his position as the general champion of Britain against the Danes. Scotland and Strathclyde had suffered as much from Scandinavian invasions as England had. To choose the West-Saxon King as their over-lord might involve some national humiliation, but it was better to receive the champion of Christendom as an over-lord than to be exposed without defence to the |Novelty and greatness of his position.| incursions of the heathen. Eadward thus obtained a far greater extent of dominion than had been held by Ecgberht himself. Ecgberht’s immediate kingdom stopped at the Thames, and his over-lordship reached only to the Forth. Eadward’s immediate kingdom reached to the Humber, and his over-lordship extended over the whole island. The submission of Scotland and Strathclyde to Eadward is the most distinctive feature in Eadward’s reign. It was something which surpassed the greatest exploits of his predecessors. The Scots had recognized a precarious supremacy in the old Northumbrian Kings. They had recognized a supremacy yet more precarious still in the great Frankish Emperor. But their submission to Wessex was wholly new; the days had long passed when they had bowed to an over-lord at York, and they had never before bowed to an over-lord at |Vassalage of Scotland. 924–1328.| Winchester. This commendation of Scotland to the West-Saxon King is an event so important for the history of the next four hundred years, and it is an event which is often so completely misunderstood, that I must reserve some consideration of its exact bearing for my next Chapter. It is enough to say here that, from this time to the fourteenth century, the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the isle of Britain. No doubt many attempts were made to cast off the dependent relation which had been voluntarily incurred; but when a King of the English had once been chosen “to father and to lord,” his successors never willingly gave up the position which had thus been bestowed upon them. Whenever the King of the English is strong enough, he always appears as the acknowledged |973.| superior of the King of Scots. Kenneth acts the part of a faithful vassal to Eadgar. Eadward the Confessor, like his nobler namesakes before and after, acts as superior |1054.| lord and, as such, transfers the tributary crown from an |1072.| usurper to the lawful heir. When the Norman William had subdued England, he claimed and received the homage of Scotland as one of the undoubted rights of the crown |Homage paid for Scotland proper.| which he had won. And nothing is clearer than that this homage was paid, not only for Cumberland or Lothian, but for the true kingdom of the Celtic Picts and Scots. In the days of Eadward and Æthelstan, Lothian was still English or Danish, an integral part of the kingdom of Northumberland, and the submission of Strathclyde was the separate act of another independent prince. The facts are undoubted; they are plain matters of history, which ought never to be looked at through the medium of provincial prejudice. The vassalage of Scotland to England is as certain as the earlier vassalage of Mercia to Wessex; but, for the last hundred and sixty years, one fact has been of as little practical importance as the other.

§ 5. The Imperial Sovereignty of the West-Saxon Kings of the English. 924–975.

Eadward the Elder then was the first prince who could really claim to be King of the English and Lord of the |Reign of Æthelstan. 925–940.| Isle of Britain. His son Æthelstan added the finishing stroke to the work of his father, by first making Northumberland |926.| an integral portion of the realm. He thus became immediate King of all the Teutonic races in Britain, and superior Lord of all the Celtic principalities. |Renewal of homage by the vassal Kings. 926.| In his second year, all the vassal princes, Welsh and Scottish, and the English prince of Northumberland beyond the Tyne,^[62] renewed their homage. It is expressly mentioned that they renounced all idolatry; many of the Danes no doubt still clave to their ancient worship. But Æthelstan had to fight to retain the empire which his father had won. Neither Danes, Welsh, nor Scots were very faithful vassals; but the power of the King of the |933.| English was too much for them all. Scotland was ravaged by land and sea; Wales was constrained not only to homage but to tribute. At last the rebellious Danes and their kinsmen from Ireland who came to their help, together with Constantine of Scotland and Owen of Strathclyde, who did not scruple to league themselves with the |Battle of Brunanburh. 937.| heathen barbarians, were all overthrown by Æthelstan and his brother Eadmund in the glorious fight of Brunanburh. That fight, looked on at the time as the hardest victory that Angles and Saxons had ever won, still lives in the earliest and noblest of those national lays with which the Chronicles, especially at this period,^[63] relieve the direct |Foreign connexions of Æthelstan.| course of their prose narrative. The reign of this great prince is also remarkable for the brilliant position which England now held with regard to foreign countries. Contrary to the usual custom of English Kings, Æthelstan, himself childless, systematically formed family connexions with the chief powers of Europe. His numerous sisters |[Marriage 929. Otto King, 936. Emperor, 962.]| were married to a crowd of princes, ranging in dignity from Sihtric, the momentary King of the Northumbrians, to Otto, who placed his English wife on the throne of the East-Franks and who lived to be the restorer of the Roman Empire. With some degree of exaggeration of the real facts, the court of “glorious Æthelstan” is painted to us as the common refuge of oppressed princes and as the school where the scions of royalty learned the lessons which befitted kings and warriors. But putting aside glories which are at least partly fabulous, it is certain that the reign of Æthelstan was a time of vigorous government and successful warfare at home, and that in his days England had an unusual amount of connexion with foreign countries, and enjoyed an unusual amount of consideration among them.^[64] The reigns of his two |Reigns of Eadmund and Eadred. 940–955.| younger brothers, Eadmund the Magnificent and Eadred the Excellent,^[65] form a continuation of the same tale. The Northumbrian Danes were constantly revolting, constantly setting up kings of their own, and they were as constantly brought back to submission by the superior power of the |Final submission of Northumberland. 954.| Emperor^[66] of Britain. At last, under Eadred, the rebellious land was finally subdued, the last phantom of Northumbrian royalty vanished, and the whole land beyond the Humber was for the future ruled by Earls of the King’s appointment. Another success, hardly less valuable, |Final recovery of the Five Boroughs. 941.| was the final recovery of the Five Boroughs by Eadmund; a poetical entry in the Chronicles vividly paints the delight of their English inhabitants at their |Period of friendly relations with Scotland. 937–1000.| deliverance from the yoke of their heathen masters.^[67] The relations of Scotland to the Imperial power seem, after the great defeat of Brunanburh, to have remained friendly for many years. Several Scottish Kings in succession had the wisdom to avoid following the suicidal policy of Constantine. Indeed the Scottish King Malcolm received a considerable extension of territory at the hands of Eadmund. The Kingdom of Strathclyde was conquered and abolished, and part of it, under the name of Cumberland, |Grant of Cumberland to Malcolm. 945.| was granted by Eadmund to Malcolm, on the usual tenure of faithful service in war.^[68] This principality remained for a long time the apanage of the heirs-apparent of the Scottish crown, much as Kent had been to Wessex in the |946.| days of Ecgberht and Æthelwulf. That the Scots renewed their oaths on the accession of Eadred is no proof of hostile feelings on either side; it was merely an usual and necessary precaution at the beginning of a new reign, doubly necessary when Northumberland was in rebellion. The work begun by Ecgberht was now finally accomplished. The King of the West-Saxons had grown step by step into the acknowledged King of the English and Emperor of the Isle of Albion. A time now came when it seemed for a moment that that work was about to be undone, and that the blow was struck in the very hearth and home of the English Empire. For a moment Wessex and Mercia were again divided. The events of the next reign are recorded with a singular amount of contradiction,^[69] and the voice to which we should have listened with undoubting |Succession of Eadwig in Wessex and Eadgar in Mercia. 955.| confidence is all but silent.^[70] But as far as can be made out, the two young sons of Eadmund succeeded their uncle Eadred, the elder, Eadwig, reigning in Wessex as superior lord, while the younger, Eadgar, reigned as Under-king north of the Thames. From the stirring tale of an Empire saved, consolidated, and defended by the unwearied efforts of six wise and valiant monarchs, we turn to find ourselves involved in the thick of an ecclesiastical controversy. |Dunstan. 925–988.| Dunstan, a name known to too many readers only as the subject of one of the silliest of monastic legends, stands forth as the leading man in Church and State. As the minister of Eadred and of Eadgar, as the Jehoiada or |Character of his policy.| Seneca who watched over the still harmless childhood of the second Æthelred, Dunstan is entitled to lasting and honourable renown. The ecclesiastical changes which are commonly connected with his name, but which perhaps rather belong to contemporary prelates like Oda of Canterbury and Æthelwald of Winchester, are of a more doubtful character. To bring back the monks to the observance of their rule, to raise the character of the secular clergy, often no doubt ignorant and worthless enough, were thoroughly praiseworthy undertakings. But the complete prohibition of clerical marriage, the substitution of regulars for seculars in many of the cathedral and other chief churches of England, were certainly the works of a zeal which had far outrun discretion. And these measures had also the effect of dividing the nation into two parties, and of producing an amount of mutual hostility which might well have led to even greater evils than it did lead to. The whole of the short reign of Eadwig is shrouded in mystery; but it is clear that he was the enemy of Dunstan, perhaps to some extent the enemy of the monks generally, and it is certain that he was the vigorous opponent of the policy which strove everywhere to substitute monks for secular |956.| canons. The banishment of Dunstan, combined with an uncanonical marriage, seems to have roused popular feeling against a prince on whose real merits we are hardly in a |Eadgar chosen King of the Mercians. 957.| position to pronounce a judgement. The Mercians chose their Under-king Eadgar King in his own right, and in his separate dominions Dunstan was recalled and his policy vigorously carried out. The death of Eadwig soon followed, |Eadgar succeeds to the whole kingdom. 958–975.| and the Kingdom of England and the Empire of all Britain were again united under the sceptre of Eadgar the Peaceful. His reign of seventeen years is a period of almost unbroken peace; we hear, almost unavoidably, of wars with the Welsh, of moment enough to be recorded by Welsh chroniclers, but which the English writers pass by.^[71] Of Danish invasions we hear nothing for certain; but Westmoreland, a part of the Cumbrian fief of the Scottish |966.| King, was once ravaged, seemingly by Eadgar’s orders,^[72] |958| and we hear also more distinctly of a portion of Eadgar’s own kingdom, the Isle of Thanet, being treated in the like way at his bidding. These last facts point to some local |His peaceful and vigorous government.| revolts or disturbances.^[73] With these exceptions, weapons of war seem to have hung useless throughout the English dominions for a time which, short as it seems to us, was in those days a wonderfully long interval of repose. But if Eadgar’s sword hung useless, it at least did not rust. Eadgar, like Ælfred, knew how to guard his Empire, and a fleet which yearly sailed round the whole island, and which often carried the King in person, was a sufficient |His effective supremacy over all Britain.| safeguard of Britain against foreign foes. And no West-Saxon Basileus ever made his supremacy so fully felt by all the races of the island as the one West-Saxon Basileus who never drew his sword against a Scottish or Northumbrian enemy. After a single inroad early in his reign,^[74] Kenneth of Scotland remained on good terms with his over-lord, and, according to some statements, Eadgar even increased his dominions by a most important grant of territory.^[75] To the Danes of Northumberland he was anxious to show that he had no mind to deal with them as with a conquered people, and that he remembered their services in helping to raise him to the crown.^[76] In his legislation he takes care to assert their perfect equality with the English and their right to be governed only by laws of their own choosing.^[77] He delighted in pomp and splendour, and there seems no reason to doubt the historic truth of the tale of that famous pageant in which |973.| the Emperor of Britain was rowed on the Dee by eight vassal kings.^[78] But if the tale were only a symbolical expression, it would still be a most true and speaking symbol of the days of the greatest glory and prosperity of |He encourages intercourse with foreign countries.| the West-Saxon Empire. Under Eadgar too England held a high place in the estimation of foreign lands, and intercourse with them, commercial and otherwise, was carefully promoted by his enlightened policy.^[79] In ecclesiastical matters the party of the regulars was steadily favoured. This fact may perhaps have won for Eadgar more than his due share of praise at the hands of monastic writers. But exaggeration itself cannot obscure the real glory of such a reign as his.^[80]

But with Eadgar the glory of England sank. The reign of his elder son Eadward was short and troubled, and the young prince himself died by violence, most probably through the intrigues of an ambitious step-mother. |Reign of Æthelred the Unready. 979–1016.| He was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, a child, and one who would have been happy if he had always remained a child. In his time the Danish invasions began again, in a new form and with a more terrible effect than ever. In his time too begins that direct and intimate connexion between English and Norman history which shows that we are now approaching the days of the Norman Conquest, and that we have reached the first links in the chain of its direct causes. The reign of Æthelred will therefore claim a somewhat fuller treatment than that of a preliminary sketch.