before another king asserted his superior power. The same
phenomenon was seen with regard to the Mercian kings of the
8th century; the long reigns of the two conquerors
Æthelbald and Offa covered eighty years (716–796),
and it might have been supposed that after such a
term of supremacy Mercia would have remained
permanently at the head of the English kingdoms. It was not
so, Æthelbald in his old age lost his hegemony at the battle
Supremacy
of Mercia.
of Burford (752), and was murdered a few years after by his
own people. Offa had to win back by long wars what his kinsman
had lost; he became so powerful that we find the pope
calling him Rex Anglorum, as if he were the only king in the
island. He annexed Kent and East Anglia, overawed Northumbria
and Wessex, both hopelessly faction-ridden at the time,
was treated almost as an equal by the emperor Charles the Great,
and died still at the height of his power. Yet the moment that
he was dead all his vassals revolted; his successors could never
recover all that was lost. Kent once more became a kingdom,
and two successive Mercian sovereigns, Beornwulf and Ludica,
fell in battle while vainly trying to recover Offa’s supremacy
over East Anglia and Wessex.
The ablest king in England in the generation that followed Offa was Ecgbert of Wessex, who had long been an exile abroad, and served for thirteen years as one of the captains of Charles the Great. He beat Beornwulf of Mercia at Ellandune (A.D. 823), permanently annexed Kent, to Supremacy of Wessex. whose crown he had a claim by descent, in 829 received the homage of all the other English kings, and was for the remainder of his life reckoned as “Bretwalda.” But it is wrong to call him, as some have done, “the first monarch of all England.” His power was no greater than that of Oswio or Offa had been, and the supremacy might perhaps have tarried with Wessex no longer than it had tarried with Northumbria or Mercia if it had not chanced that the Danish raids were now beginning. For these invasions, paradoxical as it may seem, were the greatest efficient cause in the welding together of England. They seemed about to rend the land in twain, but they really cured the English of their desperate particularism, and drove all the tribes to take as their common rulers the one great line of native kings which survived the Danish storm, and maintained itself for four generations of desperate fighting against the invaders. On the continent the main effect of the viking invasions was to dash the empire of Charles the Great into fragments, and to aid in producing the numberless petty states of feudal Europe. In this island they did much to help the transformation of the mere Bretwaldaship of Ecgbert into the monarchy of all England.
Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made his first tentative appearance on the British shore. It was in the reign of Beorhtric, Ecgbert’s predecessor, that the pirates of the famous “three ships from Heretheland” had appeared on the coast Danish invasions. of Dorset, and slain the sheriff “who would fain have known what manner of men they might be.” A few years later another band appeared, rising unexpectedly from the sea to sack the famous Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne (793). After that their visits came fast and furious on the shore-line of every English kingdom, and by the end of Ecgbert’s reign it was they, and not his former Welsh and Mercian enemies, who were the old monarch’s main source of trouble. But he brought his Bretwaldaship to a good end by inflicting a crushing defeat on them at Hingston Down, hard by the Tamar, probably in 836, and died ere the year was out, leaving the ever-growing problem to his son Æthelwulf.
The cause of the sudden outpouring of the Scandinavian
deluge upon the lands of Christendom at this particular date is
one of the puzzles of history. So far as memory ran,
the peoples beyond the North Sea had been seafaring
races addicted to piracy. Even Tacitus mentions
Influence
of viking
sea-power.
their fleets. Yet since the 5th century they had been
restricting their operations to their own shores, and are barely
heard of in the chronicles of their southern neighbours. It seems
most probable that the actual cause of their sudden activity
was the conquest of the Saxons by Charles the Great, and his
subsequent advance into the peninsula of Denmark. The emperor
seemed to be threatening the independence of the North,
and in terror and resentment the Scandinavian peoples turned
first to strike at the encroaching Frank, and soon after to assail
the other Christian kingdoms which lay behind, or on the flank
of, the Empire. But their offensive action proved so successful
and so profitable that, after a short time, the whole manhood
of Denmark and Norway took to the pirate life. Never since
history first began to be recorded was there such a supreme
example of the potentialities of sea-power. Civilized Europe
had been caught at a moment when it was completely destitute
of a war-navy; the Franks had never been maritime in their
tastes, the English seemed to have forgotten their ancient seafaring
habits. Though their ancestors had been pirates as fierce
as the vikings of the 9th century, and though some of their later
kings had led naval armaments—Edwin had annexed for a
moment Man and Anglesea, and Ecgfrith had cruelly ravaged
part of Ireland—yet by the year 800 they appear to have ceased
to be a seafaring race. Perhaps the long predominance of Mercia,
an essentially inland state, had something to do with the fact.
At any rate England was as helpless as the Empire when first the
Danish and Norwegian galleys began to cross the North Sea, and
to beat down both sides of Britain seeking for prey. The number
of the invaders was not at first very great; their fleets were not
national armaments gathered by great kings, but squadrons of
a few vessels collected by some active and enterprising adventurer.
Their original tactics were merely to land suddenly near some
thriving seaport, or rich monastery, to sack it, and to take to the
water again before the local militia could turn out in force against
them. But such raids proved so profitable that the vikings
soon began to take greater things in hand; they began to ally
themselves in confederacies: two, six or a dozen “sea-kings”
would join their forces for something more than a desultory raid.
With fifty or a hundred ships they would fall upon some unhappy
region, harry it for many miles inland, and offer battle to
the landsfolk unless the latter came out in overpowering force.
And as their crews were trained warriors chosen for their high
spirit, contending with a raw militia fresh from the plough, they
were generally successful. If the odds were too great they
could always retire to their ships, put to sea, and resume their
predatory operations on some other coast three hundred miles
away. As long as their enemies were unprovided with a navy
they were safe from pursuit and annihilation. The only chance
against them was that, if caught too far from the base-fort
where they had run their galleys ashore, they might find their
communication with the sea cut off, and be forced to fight for
their lives surrounded by an infuriated countryside. But in the
earlier years of their struggles with Christendom the vikings
seldom suffered a complete disaster; they were often beaten
but seldom annihilated. Ere long they grew so bold that they
would stay ashore for months, braving the forces of a whole
kingdom, and sheltering themselves in great palisaded camps
on peninsulas or islands when the enemy pressed them too hard.
On well-guarded strongholds like Thanet or Sheppey in England,
Noirmoutier at the Loire mouth, or the Isle of Walcheren, they
defied the local magnates to evict them. Finally they took to
wintering on the coast of England or the Empire, a preliminary
to actual settlement and conquest. (See Viking.)
King Ecgbert died long ere the invaders had reached this stage
of insolence. Æthelwulf, his weak and kindly son, would undoubtedly
have lost the titular supremacy of Wessex
over the other English kingdoms if there had been in
Mercia or Northumbria a strong king with leisure to
Progress
of Danish conquest.concentrate his thoughts on domestic wars. But the
vikings were now showering such blows on the northern states
that their unhappy monarchs could think of nothing but self-defence.
They slew Redulf—king of Northumbria—in 844, took
London in 851, despite all the efforts of Burgred of Mercia, and
forced that sovereign to make repeated appeals for help to
Æthelwulf as his overlord. For though Wessex had its full share
of Danish attacks it met them with a vigour that was not seen in
