Wessex to the West, as Cenwealh and Ine had done before him. But he also did much more than they had ever done, for he gradually brought all the other English Kingdoms under his own power. His first wars were with the Mercians, with part of whom you will remember that there was a battle the very day that he was chosen King. But we do not read much about Mercian wars till 825. In 823 one Beornwulf had turned out Ceolwulf, the last King of the Mercians that I told you of. I do not find how the war between him and Ecgberht began; but in 825 there was a great battle at a place called Ællandun or Ælla's Down, and if that be, as some make it, near Salisbury, it is clear that Beornwulf must have got a long way into Ecgberht's dominions. It was a very hard battle, and Hun the Alderman of the Sumorsætas was killed; but at last the West-Saxons won. There were songs made about it, of which we find little scraps in some of our books. And one chronicle written in rhyme a long time afterwards says:

Ellandune, Ellandune, thy land is full red

Of the blood of Bernewolf: there he took his dede (death). Beornwulf however did not die at Ællandun, but was only defeated and fled. When Ecgberht had thus weakened Mercia, he thought he might get back the lordship over the smaller Kingdoms, which had once belonged to the West-Saxons, but which the Mercians had lately held. So he sent his son Æthelwulf with Ealhstan Bishop of Sherborne and Wulfheard the Alderman, and they drove out Baldred the King of Kent, seemingly without any fighting. Then all the people of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex submitted themselves willingly to Ecgberht: for in most of those Kingdoms the line of the old Kings had come to an end, and they did not care for the new Kings who rose up of themselves, or whom the Kings of the Mercians had put in. So they were quite willing to be under Ecgberht, especially as his father had once been King of Kent. And no doubt the people in Essex and Sussex, being Saxons, liked the West-Saxons better than the Angles of Mercia, and felt more akin to them. Thus you see Ecgberht was now King of all the Saxons and Jutes, that is of all England south of the Thames, and of Essex to the north of it. And if he had

H

Essex, he could hardly fail to have had also the great city of London. Ecgberht, having got this large dominion, made his son Æthelwulf King of Kent under him.

This was hardly done when the King of the East-Angles, whose name we do not know, begged Ecgberht to come and help him against the Mercians, who were greatly oppressing him and his people. We can well believe that the EastAngles had sorely hated the Mercians ever since their King Æthelberht had been so treacherously killed by Offa. So Ecgberht said he would help them. On this Beornwulf went against the East-Angles, swearing that he would destroy them utterly; but the East-Angles stood up against him and fought, a battle, in which he was killed. The next King of the Mercians, Ludeca, came the next year, and was killed also, with five of his Aldermen. It does not seem clear whether the West-Saxons actually helped the East-Angles in this war, but one can hardly think that the East-Angles could have done so much all by themselves. At any rate, in 828, Ecgberht drove the next King of the Mercians, Wiglaf, out of his Kingdom, and only let him come back next year as his man. Meanwhile Ecgberht had gone up towards Northumberland, but the Northumbrians met him at Dore in Derbyshire, just on the borders of Northumberland and Mercia, and submitted to him without any fighting. Northumberland was just now very weak; for a long time various Kings had been rising and falling, whose names I need not give you, so the Northumbrians were not at all able to withstand Ecgberht.

Ecgberht was thus Lord over all the other English Kings, and the submission of Mercia seems to have led to the submission of the Welsh in what we now call Wales. Cenwulf of Mercia had already done a great deal to subdue them. The Welsh Chronicles tell us that in 816 he got as far as Snowdon, which the Welsh call Ereri, and in 819 he harried Dyfed or Pembrokeshire. And in 822 Beornwulf conquered Powys, the middle part of Wales on the borders of Mercia. So after the Mercians had submitted to Ecgberht, it is no wonder that we read that in 828, when he led his army into Wales, all the country submitted to him. Thus you see that Ecgberht had a greater power than any King that had ever

been in Britain before him. For he was King of all the Saxons and Jutes, and Lord over all the Angles and at any rate over the more part of the Welsh. I say the more part, because I do not find anything said about the Strathclyde Welsh or about the Scots. They had, as you know, sometimes been more or less under the Kings of the Northumbrians; but it is not likely that they had been so lately while Northumberland was in such disorder. But you must never forget that Northumberland then took in a great deal of what is now Scotland, namely all Lothian, with King Edwin's Castle, which is Edinburgh. So King Ecgberht was Lord from the Irish Sea to the German Ocean and from the English Channel to the Firth of Forth. So it is not wonderful if, in his charters, he not only called himself King of the West-Saxons or King of the West-Saxons and Kentishmen, but sometimes Rex Anglorum or King of the English.

But amidst all this glory there were the signs of great evils at hand. The Danes came several times. In 834 they ravaged Sheppey in Kent. The next year thirty-five ships came to Charmouth in Dorsetshire, where they fought King Ecgberht himself and defeated him. But in neither case do they seem to have made any attempt to stay in the land. And, as you know, in 836 Ecgberht beat the Welsh and the Danes together in the great battle at Hengestesdun.

The next year, 837, King Ecgberht died, and his son Æthelwulf, the King of Kent, was chosen King of the West-Saxons. And he gave his Kingdom of Kent, with Sussex, Surrey, and Essex, to Æthelstan his son.

CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THE DANES CAME INTO ENGLAND, AND HOW
ENGLAND BECAME ONE KINGDOM.

I HAVE now told you the chief things which you need know about the history of our people down to the time when, under King Ecgberht, the West-Saxons became for ever the chief people of Britain, and their Kings became Lords over all the other princes of the island. I have told you how the English first came into Britain, how they won the land bit by bit from the Welsh, how they founded several Kingdoms, seven and more, how they became Christians, how sometimes one Kingdom and sometimes another had the chief power over the rest, and how at last that chief power became fixed in the hands of the Kings of the West-Saxons. A wise man might have been quite sure from the beginning that, sooner or later, all the different English Kingdoms would get joined together, but it was not at all clear which would be the one to get the upper hand over the rest. And till Ecgberht began to reign, perhaps nobody would have thought that Wessex was to be the head Kingdom. And it is worth while to stop and think what a great difference it has made to us that the chief power did come to Wessex rather than to any of the other Kingdoms. Let us suppose, for instance, that Northumberland had kept at the head, as it was in the days of King Edwin. We may be sure that, had this been so, two things at least would have been very different from what they are now. Our language, which is now much more Saxon than Anglian, would be much more Anglian than Saxon; it would be more like what is now spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland. And we may be sure too that York would be the capital instead of London. Now if the

chief power had thus been placed in the north, most likely Scotland would have been joined to England much sooner than it was; but on the other hand, through the chief power being in the south, in the part nearest to the continent, England has been able to take a much greater share in the general affairs of Europe than it otherwise could have taken. You will find, as you read more of history, that the importance of a country depends very much on its position as well as on its size. Norway and Portugal, and Scotland while it was a separate Kingdom, were never of much account in Europe,1 not only because they were smaller than most other Kingdoms, but because they were, so to speak, so far out of the way. Much smaller states, and even single cities, if they were in a better position for influencing other states, were thought much more of. I do not know whether you can quite understand all that I have been just now saying, but I think you can understand that it has made a great difference to us that the chief power was fixed in the south of England and not in the north. It is only quite lately, since so much of trade and manufacture and mining has arisen in the north of England, that the north has been of at all the same account as the south. Perhaps now the north is of more account than the south. But it is only quite lately that it has become so, and the south of England was of much more account than the north for many hundred years, and the reason doubtless was because the chief power among the Old-English King. doms came into the hands of Ecgberht of Wessex.

Another thing that I told you was how the Danes and other Northmen were now beginning to come into England. A great deal of what I shall have to tell you now will have to be about the wars which the West-Saxon Kings had to wage with these Danes, and about the way in which many of the Danes at last settled in the land and became Englishmen. And you must remember that the Danes, even while fighting against the West-Saxon Kings, did in a manner help them to become Kings of the whole land. This they did by weakening and destroying the smaller Kingdoms. You will remember

1 Whatever importance Scotland had came from the fact that the French Kings were cunning enough to see that Scotland was an useful ally for them against England.