Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/622

570 NORTHUMBERLAND on his southern and the Pictish kings on his northern border. In 684, tempted by his good fortune, he sent his general Beret to ravage Ireland, then, says Bede, a peace ful and friendly country, which implies that his dominions had now touched some parts of the western shores, and next year he himself invaded the territory of the northern Picts, where he was defeated and slain by their king Bredei or Brude at Nechtan s Mere (Dunnichen ? in Forfarshire) in 685. The result was that not only the Picts recovered their own land and ceased to pay tribute, but some of the Britons also became independent. The Northumbrian Church under the able leadership of Wilfrid shared in the extension of the kingdom, and it also shared in its repulse. A bishopric established under Trumwine at Abercorn in Linlithgowshire, in the country of the Angles, but close to the arm of the sea dividing the Angles and the Picts (Bede, iv. 26), had to be abandoned. The Forth was destined to be the limit of Northumbrian sovereignty to the north. Shortly before the close of this reign a dispute between the king and Wilfrid led to the division of the diocese of York into two bishoprics York, of which Bosa was made bishop, and that of Lindisfarne or Hexham, whose first bishop was Eata. A new bishopric was erected for the district of the Lindissi (Lincoln), who had been conquered by Egfrid. To this or the next reign belong the earliest fragmentary memorials of the Northumbrian or Northern English dialect which have come down to our time the Runic inscription of the crosses at Ruthwell and perhaps those at Thornhill in Dumfriesshire and at Bewcastle in Cumberland. It was during the same period that C^EDMON (q.v.), a monk of Whitby, the earliest English poet, died (680), and BEDE (q.v.), the monk of Wearmouth and Yarrow, the earliest English historian, except the anony mous authors of the A.S. Chronicle, Aldhelm, and Eddi, the writer of Wilfrid s life, was born (672 or 674). To their influence, and to the learned which succeeded the warlike epoch of Northumberland during the next century down to the death of Alcuin of York in 804, may be ascribed the fact that, while Saxon Wessex became the dominant state, the language and the land south of the Forth received from the Angles the name of English- and England. Egfrid was succeeded by his brother Aldfrid, an ille gitimate son of Oswy (685-705), who "retrieved," in the words of Bede, " the ruined state of the kingdom, though within narrower bounds." It was in his reign that Cuth- bert, a monk of Melrose, which had been founded by Bishop Eata, became bishop of Lindisfarne. His preaching commenced the Christianization of the country between the Forth and the Tweed, and his fame quickly gathering a legendary halo of miracles led to his being adopted as the patron saint of Durham and the north of England, as well as of southern Scotland. While no serious attempt was made to regain the lost territory in the country of the Northern Picts, Egfrid, his son Osred (705-716), and Osred s successors, Coenred (716-718), Osric (718-729), and Ceolwulf (729-737), some of whom were descendants of a different branch of the family of Ida, gradually extended the limits of their kingdom to the west, and, following the coast, established themselves in Galloway and as far as Cunningham (Bede, v. 12), the northern district of modern Ayrshire. Shortly before 731, when Bede concluded his history, an Anglian see had been created at Whithorn (Candida Casa} in Galloway, of which Pechthelm was the first bishop, and which lasted till 803. The last of the important kings of Northumberland, Eadbert (737-758), pushed his arms as far as the Clyde, defeating the Britons in Kyle, and, in alliance with Angus Macfergus, king of the Picts, took Allclyd (Dumbarton), the chief town or fortress of the Strathclyde Britons, in 756. These were uncertain conquests. The epoch of Northumbrian greatness closes with Oswy. It is significant that two of the last-named kings, Ceolwulf and Eadbert, resigned the crown for the tonsure. External circumstances combined with the enervation of the royal race to produce the decline of Northumberland. Its southern neighbour, Mercia, was ruled by two powerful kings, Ethelbald, who ravaged Northumberland in 737, and after his death the great Offa (757-796), the con temporary of Charlemagne; while a series of Northum brian kings, of whom we know little save the names and the dates of their mostly violent deaths Oswulf (758), Ethelwald (765), Alchred (774), Ethelred (779), Alfwold (788), Osred (792), another Ethelred (796), whose wife, Ethelfreda, was a daughter of Offa wasted in intestine struggles the kingdom of their predecessors. On its northern boundary a vigorous line of Pictish kings, beginning with Angus Macfergus (731-761), the ally of Eadbert against the Britons of Strathclyde, whose chief seat was Scone, threatened, and there is no doubt often passed, the boundary of the Forth, but the Angles retained Lothian during the 8th and the first half of the 9th cen tury, and it was not till a century after the union of the Scots and Picts under Kenneth Macalpine (844), in the reign of Indulph (954-962), that Edinburgh became Scot tish instead of Northumbrian ground. In 793 the heathen Northmen signalized the commencement of the attacks which were for several centuries to vex the coast of Britain by the sack of Lindisfarne, and in the following year of Yarrow. Though this descent was repelled, the Danish vikings with increased numbers renewed their raids in the following century. Before its close the southern half of Northumberland had received a large infusion of Danish population. Their distant kinship in race and not so dis tant likeness of language favoured their settlement in the territory of the Angles. With the close of the 8th century the history of the kingdom of Northumberland practically ends, though a few names of kings of pure Anglian race are recorded in the 9th century. It may be convenient to trace the subsequent fate of this king dom and its parts. In 827 Eadred, king of Northumberland, sub mitted to Egbert, the founder of the greatness of Wessex, and agreed to pay tribute in order to stay the progress of that kingdom at the Humber. In 875 the Danish host, now too large for and weary of mere raids, divided itself between Guthorm, who led his division against southern England, where its final repulse by Alfred made him the hero of Ms race, while Healfdene, with no Alfred amongst the Angles to oppose him, conquered Northumberland and settled his followers on the east coast, throughout the whole of ancient Deira, the southern part of ancient Bernicia, and as far west as the central listricts of Anglian Cumberland. Wherever the " by " replaced the older name or gave a new name to the settlement, wherever the " t " still lingers instead of "the " as the article, linguistic scholars see certain marks of Danish occupation. This occupation retarded the northern advance of the Wessex kings, the descendants of Alfred, and a century elapsed before Edward the Elder in 924 received again at Bakewell in Derbyshire the homage of the Northum brians, as Egbert in 827 is said to have done ahnost at the same point, whose position on the extreme southern border of Northum berland is significant. This homage is recorded in the contested passage of the A.S. Chronicle: "And then chose him for father md lord the king of the Scots and the whole nation of the Scots ind Regnwald and the sons of Eadulf and all those who dwell in Northumbria, as well Angles as Danes, Northmen, and others." Rut the dispute as to the precise nature and extent of the sub mission does not concern the present subject so much as the evi dence it affords of the mixed population of Northumberland, and of the absence of any prominent sovereign of the whole country whose name could be mentioned by the Chronicle. In the reign of Athel- stan, the son of Edward the Elder, the great victory of Brunan- burgh (937), by which he defeated the united forces of Olaf Cuaran, the son of Sitric, the Danish king or eai l, his father-in-law Con stantino, king of the Scots, another Olaf, the son of Godfry, king of the Irish Danes, and the British prince of Cumbria, made the conquest of Northumberland south of the Solway and the Tweed more of a reality. Norse mercenaries under Egil, the hero of the Icelandic saga, fought in the army of Athelstan, and a few years