operation of the West Saxon and Mercian fyrds, and finding in 896 that no real help was to be obtained either from the North Welsh or from the Northumbrian or Midland Danes, he gave up the contest and went back to Frankland. After this Alfred had peace for the rest of his days. He lived a few years longer, but died on 26 October 899, when still only fifty-one years old[1].
The fifty years following the death of Alfred are the time when the kingdom of England was really established. Alfred's great work had been to save Wessex from foreign invaders, and then to re-organise what he had saved; but he had never aimed at conquests beyond his borders. Even over Mercia he had exercised no real sovereignty, and still less over the chieftains of Glamorgan and Gwent, Brecknock and Dyfed, who had sought his protection; and so he was in no sense king of England or even of half England. When he died, the territories over which he ruled, and where his laws held good, were confined to the shires south of the Thames, and in the rest of England there were a far greater number of independent principalities than there had been a century earlier. When therefore his eldest son, generally called Edward the Elder to distinguish him from later kings of the same name, was elected to succeed him, it was only the West Saxon magnates who took part in the ceremony, and no one could have predicted that a union of the petty English states would soon be brought about by the West Saxon dynasty. Edward, however, unlike his father, within a few years adopted a policy of expansion in imitation of the earlier Bretwaldas, and fortune so aided him and the three capable sons who afterwards succeeded him in turn, that by 954 the house of Ecgbert had not merely acquired an overlordship of the old pattern but had completely ousted all the other ruling families, whether English or Danish, so that, formally at any rate, there was only one recognised king left in all England.
The events, which produced this far-reaching change, are clear enough in their main outlines, but it is very difficult to arrange them in their proper sequence, as no dates in Edward's reign (899-925) can be fixed with any certainty owing to discrepancies in chronology between the English, Welsh and Irish annals, discrepancies which later historians have attempted to get over by dovetailing the various accounts one into the other, and therefore duplicating not a few of the incidents of the story. All the sources however agree in stating that Edward's first difficulties arose with his cousin Aethelwald, the younger of the sons of King Aethelred, Alfred's elder brother. This prince, Aethelhelm his elder brother, and a third aetheling, called Osferth, had under Alfred's will divided between them the royal booklands in Sussex and Surrey. Aethelwald's share comprised Guildford, Godalming and Steyning, all
- ↑ The length of the reigns of Alfred, Edward the Elder and Aethelstan are matters of controversy; for a recent discussion of the difficulties see M. L. R. Beavan, Eng. Hist. Rev. 1917, Vol. XXX, 517-531.
