was Sussex. It was but a small state, and it seems to have been much more barbarous than other parts of England. The first Christian King was called Æthelwealh. He too had married a Christian wife, Eaba, from the little kingdom of the Hwiccas, and he was himself baptized at the court of King Wulfhere in Mercia. But as yet few of their people were converted, till in 681 Bishop Wilfrith, who had persuaded King Oswiu to follow the Roman usages, came among them. He had been Bishop of York, but had been driven out of Northumberland by the King Ecgfrith the son of Oswiu, who succeeded his father in 670. He had done much in the north by teaching men to build better churches, after the models at Rome and elsewhere in Italy, and he now did much for the South-Saxons in the way of civilizing them as well as preaching to them. Amongst other things it is said that till Wilfrith came they had no notion of catching any fish except eels, but that he taught them to catch other fish as well. He founded the Bishoprick of the South-Saxons, the see of which was at first at Selsey, but was afterwards moved to Chichester.

Thus, in less than a hundred years from the coming of Augustine, all England became Christian. And the English Church was for a long time one of the most flourishing Churches in Christendom. Many churches and monasteries were built, and there were many good and learned men among Kings, Bishops, and others. And many Englishmen went out as missionaries to other lands, especially to our own old land of North Germany. Wilfrith, who preached to the South-Saxons, preached also to the Frisians, and there were many other English Bishops in other parts of Germany. The greatest of them was Winfrith, afterwards called Saint Boniface, who was the first Archbishop of Mainz, and who is called the Apostle of Germany. His see, Mainz, became the head church of Germany, as Canterbury is the head church of England.

In my two next chapters I shall tell you how the different English Kingdoms were all joined into one.

HOW THE KINGS OF

THE WEST-SAXONS BECAME LORDS OVER ALL ENGLAND.

PART I.

I HAVE told you how the Angles and Saxons founded many Kingdoms in Britain, and I have taught you the names of the chief Kingdoms among them, and I have told you that it often happened that one Kingdom got for a while a certain power over all or most of the others. But you know that now not only England, but Wales, Scotland, and Ireland too, make up altogether only one Kingdom. It is not so very long since Scotland and Ireland were fully joined to England, and Wales kept its own Princes for many hundred years after the times that we have been talking about. What I have now to tell you is how England itself, that is the Kingdoms of the Angles, Saxons, and other Teutons who had come over into Britain, was made into one Kingdom. It was in the tenth century, that is, about five hundred years after the English came into Britain, that all England was for the first time thus thoroughly joined together, and since the eleventh century no man has ever thought for a moment of dividing it again. Only you must know that the northern part of Northumberland came into the hands of the Kings of Scots, so that some men of English blood and speech were cut off from the rest, and learned to call themselves Scots and forgot that they were really EnglishThus it is that the land from the river Tweed to the Firth of Forth, though men have always spoken English there, has for many hundred years been counted to be part of Scotland. But all the rest of the Teutonic people in Britain were gradually

men.

joined together under the Kings of the West-Saxons. From the beginning of the ninth century, that power which I have told you that some one Kingdom often held over the rest became fixed in the hands of the Kings of the West-Saxons. From the beginning of the ninth century then, though there were still for some time other Kings in the land, yet the Kings of the West-Saxons were lords over them, and in the course of the tenth century there ceased to be any other Kings in the land at all. From that time, instead of being called Kings of the West-Saxons, they were called Kings of the English. And I have told you that nearly all the Kings who have since reigned in England have come of the blood of Cerdic the West-Saxon.

Now this did not happen all at once, so.I must go back a little, and tell you some more about the West-Saxons and the other Kingdoms. But I shall tell you most about the WestSaxons, both because it was their Kingdom which in the end got the chief power, and because it is in the land of the WestSaxons that we ourselves dwell.

For a long time after Oswald and Oswiu of Northumberland no prince is mentioned in the Chronicle as bearing the title of Bretwalda. The next on the list, the eighth and last, is Ecgberht of Wessex, in whose time the West-Saxon Kings won a lasting power over all the others. We can therefore very well see why no Bretwalda is mentioned after him, as from the days of Ecgberht onwards the King of the West-Saxons for the time being had all the power, and more than the power, that the old Bretwaldas had had. But it is not so plain why no Bretwalda is mentioned between Oswiu and Ecgberht, as there were during that time several Kings both in Mercia and in Wessex who seem to have had as much power as any that were before them. One might almost have expected to find Penda himself on the list, and long after there reigned in Mercia a great King named Offa, of whom I shall speak again presently, who seems to have been quite as powerful as any one of the seven before Ecgberht. Perhaps Christian writers did not like to reckon such a fierce heathen as Penda in the same list as Edwin and Oswald, but one hardly sees why Offa is not reckoned. Still, however it may be, no Bretwalda is spoken of in the Chronicle between

Oswiu and Ecgberht.1 It is certain that during this time the first place among the English Kingdoms changed about very much, being sometimes in the hands of Mercia and sometimes in those of Wessex. Northumberland became of less consequence than it had been, and we do not hear much of the four smaller Kingdoms. When we do, it is generally as being tributary either to Mercia or to Wessex. Kent however always kept up a certain degree of importance on account of its having in it the head church of all England at Canterbury.

The last King of the West-Saxons whom I mentioned was Cenwealh, who founded the Bishoprick of Winchester. Like most of the West-Saxon Kings about this time, he had much fighting with the Mercians, and, like all the other Kings both of Mercia and Wessex, he had much fighting with the Welsh. In 644 Penda came against him, and drove him for a while out of his Kingdom, and it was perhaps now that Gloucestershire and some of the other West-Saxon lands north of the Thames and Avon became part of Mercia. But, if so, Cenwealh partly made up for this loss by a great gain in another quarter. You will remember that Ceawlin in 577 had conquered as far as the Axe. But the Welsh still kept a long narrow strip of country reaching from Frome up to Cricklade. Now I suppose it was in Cenwealh's time that this strip became English, for Cenwealh in 652 fought a battle against the Welsh at Bradford-on-Avon. In 658 he fought another battle at the hill called Pen or Peonna, and chased the Welsh as far as the river Parret. Now where is the hill called Pen? It is certainly one of our Pens in Somerset, but I do not profess to say whether it is, as many people say, Pen Selwood, or whether it is Pen Hill, a point of Mendip not very far from where I am now writing, or whether it is Pen or Ben Knoll, which is nearer still. Pen or Ben in Celtic means "head," and you

1 Bæda gives the list of the seven Bretwaldas, though, as he writes in Latin, he does not use that name. (ii. 5.) The Chronicle adds Ecgberht. It may be that Bada's list was copied by the Chronicler in the days of Ecgberht or one of his immediate descendants, and that, full of the glories of Ecgberht, he added his name to the seven in Bæda, but did not know or care enough about any King between them, especially of any King out of Wessex, to make him put down his name as well.

F

know that most of the mountains in Scotland are called Bens, Ben Nevis, Ben Lomond, and so forth; and the Welsh name of the mountain which we call the Sugar-Loaf is Pen-y-val. These Pens are some of the cases in which Welsh names have lingered on through all changes, as they have often done in Somersetshire, and still more in Devonshire. It is said that the battle at Pen was a very hard one, and that the Welsh drove the English back for a while, but then the English rallied and beat the Welsh, and chased them as far as the river Parret. You must remember that these Welsh Kings, reigning over all Cornwall and Devonshire and most part of Somersetshire, were really very powerful princes, and that their dominions were larger than those of some of the English Kings. Thus it was a great matter to take from them all the country between the Axe and the Parret, which now, or soon after, became English, Thus the land of the Sumorsætas,1 the West-Saxon tribe from which Somersetshire takes its name, grew and spread itself, and it was doubtless now that Somerton, which, like the shire itself, took its name from the tribe, became their head town. But now that the English were Christians, they did not so completely root out or enslave the old inhabitants as their heathen forefathers had done, so that many of the Welshmen still lived in the land as subjects of the West-Saxon Kings. Thus we may

be sure that many of the people in Devonshire and the greater part of Somersetshire are really descendants of the old Britons, who gradually learned to speak English, as we know that they did in Cornwall. And it was now that Glastonbury became English. The Abbey there had been founded in the British or Roman times you will remember that, as long as the English were heathens, they destroyed all the churches and monasteries that they found in the land; but now that the West-Saxons

1 Sætas is the same as settlers (connected with sit, the Latin sedere, &c.), those who settled in any particular part of the country. The word is still preserved in the name Dorsetshire, as well as Somersetshire; but in the case of the Wilsætas and Defnsætas (the people of Wiltshire and Devonshire) and the Magesatas, who lived in Herefordshire, it is gone out of use. We get the same form in Elsass (s in the High-Dutch answering tot in English), the part of Germany which was joined to France, and which Frenchmen call Alsace.