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136 ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.

CHAPTER XIV.THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX.

ONLY one English kingdom now held out against thewickings, and that was . Wessex. Its comparativelysuccessful resistance may be set down, in some slightdegree, to the energy of a single man, JElfred, thoughit was doubtless far more largely due to the relatively strong organisation of the West Saxon state.In judging of JElfred, we must lay aside the falsenotions derived from the application of words ex-pressing late ideas to an early and undeveloped stageof civilised society. To call him a great general or agreat statesman is to use utterly misleading terms.Generalship and statesmanship, as we understandthem, did not yet exist, and to speak of them in theninth century ill England is to be guilty of a common,but none the more excusable, anachronism. JElfredwas a sturdy and hearty fighter, and a good king of asemi-barbaric people. As a lad, he had visited Rome;and he retained throughout life a strong sense of hisown and his people's barbarism, and a genuine desireto civilise himself and his subjects, so far as his limitedlights could carry him. He succeeded to a kingdomoverrun fl'om end to end by piratical hordes: and hedid his best to restore peace and to promote order.

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THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. 137But his character was merely that of a practical,common-sense, fighting West Saxon, brought up inthe camp of his father and brothers, and doing hisrough work in life with the honest straightforwardnessof a simple, hard-headed, religious, but only halfeducated barbaric soldier.

The successful East Anglian wickings, under theirchief Guthrum, turned at once to ravage Wessex.They "harried the West Saxons' land, and settledthere, and drove many of the folk ov(" r sea." Forawhile it seemed as if Wessex too was to fall intotheir hands. ..cElfred himself, with a little band,"withdrew to the woods and moor-fastnesses." Hetook refuge in the Somerset marshes, and there occupied a little island of dry land in the midst of thefens, by name Athelney. Here he threw up a rudeearthwork, from which he made raids against theDanes, with a petty levy of the nearest Somersetmen. But the mass of the West Saxons were not disposed to give in so easily. The long border warfarewith Devon and Cornwall had probably kept up theirorganisation in a better state than that of the anarchicNorth. The men of Somerset and Wilts, with thoseHampshire men who had not fled to the Continent,gathered at a sacred stone on the borders of SelwoodForest, and there ..cElfred met them with his littleband. They attacked the host, which they put toflight, and then besieged it in its fortified camp.To escape the siege, Guthrum consented to leaveWessex, and to accept Christianity. He was baptised at once, with thirty of his principal chiefs, after

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ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN.the rough-and-ready fashion of the fighting king, nearAthelney. The treaty entered into with Guthrumrestored to LElfred all Wessex, with the south-westernpart of Mercia, from London to Bedford, and thencealong the line of Watling Street to Chester. Thusfor a time the Saxons recovered their autonomy, andthe great Scandinavian horde retired to East Anglia.LEthelred, LElfred's son-in-law, was appointed under king of recovered Mercia. Henceforward, TeutonicBritain remains for awhile divided into Wessex andthe Denalagu-that is to say, the district governed byDanish law.

Though peace was thus made with Guthrum, newbodies of wickings came pouring southward fromScandinavia. One of these sailed up the Thames toFulham, but after spending some time there, theywent over to the Frankish coast, where their depredations were long and severe. Throughout all LElfred'sreign, with only two intervals of peace, the wickingskept up a constant series of attacks on the coast, andlrequently penetrated inland. From time to time,the great horde under Ha::sten poured across thecountry, cutting the corn and driving away the cattle,and retreating into East Anglia, or N orthumbria, orthe peninSUla of the Wirrall, whenever they wereseriously wo'rsted. "Thanks be to God," says theChronicle pathetically "the host had not whollybroken up all the English kin;" but the misery ofEngland must have been intense. LElfred, however,introduced two military changes of great importance.He set on foot something like a r e g u l a ~ army, with a

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THE SAXONS AT BAY IN WESSEX. 139settled commissariat, dividing his forces into twobodies, so that one-half was constantly at home tillingthe soil while the other half was in the field j and hebuilt large ships. on a new plan, which he manned withFrisians, as well as with English, and which largelyaided in keeping the coast fairly free from Danishinvasion during the two intervals of peace.Throughout the whole of the ninth century, how-ever, and the early part of the tenth, the whole historyof England is the history of a perpetual pillage. Noman who sowed could tell whether he mi.sht reap ornot. The Englishman lived in constant fear of lifeand goods j he was liable at any moment to be calledout against the enemy. Whatever little civilisationhad ever existed in the country died out almost altogether. The Latin language was forgotten even bythe priests. 'War had turned everybody into fighters jcommerce was impossible when the towns were sackedyear after year by the pirates. But in the rare intervalsof p e a ~ e , .!Elfred did his best to civilise his people.The amount of work with which he is crcdited is trulyastonishing. He translated into English with hisown hand" The History of the World," by Orosius jBreda's "Ecclesiastical History j" Boethius's "DeConsolatione," and Gregory's "Regula Pastoralis."At his court, too, if not under his own direction, theEnglish Chronicle was first begun, and many ofthe sentences quoted from that great document inthis work are probably due to .!Elfred himself. Hisdevotion to the church was shown by the regularcommunic:ltion which he kept up with Rome, and by

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ANGLO-SAXON BRITAIN .the .gifts which he sent from his impoverished king-dom, not only to the shrine of St. Peter but even tothat of St. Thomas in India. No doubt his vigorouspersonality counted for much in the struggle with theDanes; but his death in 90 I left the West Saxons asready as ever to contend against the northern enemy.

One result of the Danish invasion of Wessex mustnot be passed over. The common danger seems tohave firmly welded together Welshman and Saxoninto a single nationality. . The most faithful part oflElfred's dominions were the West Welsh shires ofSomerset and Devon, with the half Celtic folk ofDorset and Wilts. The result is seen in the changewhich comes over the relations between the tworaces. In Ine's laws the distinction between Welsh-men and Englishmen is strongly marked; the priceof blood for the servile popUlation is far less thanthat of their lords: in lElfred's laws the distinctionhas died out. Compared to the heathen Dane, WestSaxons and West Welsh were equally Englishmen.From that day to this, the Celtic peasantry of theWest Country have utterly forgotten their Welsh kin-ship, save in wholly Cymric Cornwall alone. TheDevon and Somerset men have for centuries been asEnglish in tongue and feeling as the people of Kentor Sussex.