Donegal and thence spread east and west along the coasts of Ulster and Connemara. By 825 they had fairly encircled Ireland and plundered most of its shrines. In England, on the other hand, no raids are heard of for forty years after the attacks on Lindisfarne and Jarrow in Offa's days, and it was not till 834 that the danger re-appeared as the result of the establishment of Danish exiled chieftains in Frisia, as the Netherlands were then called, by Louis the Pious. In that year considerable fleets set out from Denmark and the North to attack the Frankish Empire, and coming to the mouths of the Rhine burnt the important Frisian trading ports of Dorestad and Utrecht. The general situation on the Continent is dealt with in other chapters. Here we have only to note that a detachment of this force also came to England and entering the Thames ravaged the island Sheppey. Two years later the Frisian provinces were again attacked and the town of Antwerp sacked. Again a small detachment came across to England. This time the raiders landed in Dorset, and Ecgbert himself met them at Charmouth not far from Lyme Regis. The Vikings had only 35 ships, with crews about 1200 strong, but the fight none the less went against the king, and the victors gained the impression that Wessex was worth attacking. At any rate in 838 there arrived a larger fleet which came to land in Cornwall. Once more Ecgbert marched to meet the raiders to find that the Cornish had risen to join them. Victory, however, lay with the English, the allied Danes and Welsh being put to flight at Hinxton Down, a moor on the west bank of the Tamar near Callington. As a result it would appear that a bishop, definitely subject to Canterbury, was shortly afterwards appointed for Cornwall in the person of one Kenstec, whose see was placed in the monastery of Dimmurrin[1]. This was Ecgbert's last achievement. He died in the summer of 839.
The accession of his son Aethelwulf, which almost corresponds in point of time with the death of Louis the Pious and the break-up of the Carolingian Empire on the Continent, introduces a new phase into English affairs. Hitherto the main thread of English history has been concerned with the rivalries between the English kingdoms and with the gradual growth of civilisation and a tendency to union under the auspices of the Church. But for the next forty years internal progress ceased, and as in Frankland, so in England, the one constant feature of the times was the ceaseless struggle which every province in turn had to wage against Danish invaders. In 839 the Viking raids could still be regarded as merely a passing inconvenience, and the English people hardly realised the full extent of the danger which threatened them; but from that date the raids grew more persistent and better organised year by year, and it soon became apparent that the object of the invaders was not merely plunder but the complete conquest of the country.
- ↑ Birch, Cart. Sax., No. 527. Can the latter part of Din-nurrin represent Guerür, the name of the saint buried at St Neots? Asser, c. 74.
