the feudal sense. In fact, even as regards the Yorkshire Danes, it need not be held that more was meant than that Regnald for the moment wished for peace; and so things remained as long as Edward lived. He died on 17 July 925 having reigned 26 years.
Edward was succeeded by his son Aethelstan, an equally great organizer and soldier, who ruled for fourteen years (925-939). The most striking military achievements of his reign were: the actual annexation of the kingdom of York in 926 on the death of Sihtric, Regnald's brother, an expedition beyond the Forth in 933 to chastise King Constantine for taking up the cause of Anlaf Cuaran, Sihtric's son, and the crowning battle of Brunanburh in 937, to be located it would seem at Birrenswark, an old Roman camp in Annandale nine miles north of the Solway. By this latter victory he broke up a great league of Scots, Strathclyde Britons, Irish vikings, and Danes from Cumberland and Yorkshire, which Constantine had laboriously built up in order to avenge his own wrongs and re-establish a buffer state at York. These triumphs completely cowed Aethelstan's enemies, and for the moment justified him in assuming the vaunting title of "Rex totius Britanniae" which is found on his coinage. They also brought him very great renown on the Continent, so that contemporary sovereigns eagerly sought the hands of his sisters, one of them having married Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, another marrying Hugh the Great, Count of Paris, the father of Hugh Capet, and a third Otto the Saxon, son of Henry the Fowler, who in due time was to found a new line of Roman Emperors.
Meagre as are the annals devoted to Aethelstan's reign in the Chronicle, we can also detect that he applied himself with energy to the work of adapting the institutions, which had hitherto served for the government of Wessex and Mercia, to the conditions of his greatly enlarged realm. In particular he set about establishing new local machinery in the districts between the Thames and Welland which had longest resisted his father's arms. Here he adopted the borough system invented by the Danes as the basis of a number of new shires, which are marked off from the older West Saxon shires by being named from a central fortress. He also in all probability planned a new scheme of hidage for these shires, and further subdivided them for purposes of taxation, police and justice into a number of smaller divisions of varying size, called "hundreds," which continued in use till the nineteenth century. No absolute proof can be given of this inference; but if the hundreds are counted shire by shire, it will be found that they are artificially arranged so as to form a neatly balanced scheme, in all containing 120 hundreds, and this is only likely to have been introduced in some period of resettlement after a crisis such as followed on Aethelstan's accesion. The term "hundred" moreover soon afterwards appears in the laws. A table will best shew how the hundreds were distributed, viz.:
