The History of England | Page 3

like the Israelites
of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to a woman and
child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other places taken
by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the approach of
their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled from east to
west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that of the
invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The English
hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in that
case some of the British women would be spared. It no more required
wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English language and
institutions in Britain than it required wholesale slaughter of the Irish to
produce the same results in Ireland; and a large admixture of Celtic
blood in the English race can hardly be denied.
Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they
ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this
internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and
families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the
blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal
kingdoms into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The
expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed
in Essex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was

hemmed in by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and
their tributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of the
anarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed the
supremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that each
possessed a British hinterland into which it could expand. For
Northumbria there was Strathclyde on the west and Scotland on the
north; for Mercia there was Wales; and for Wessex there were the
British remnants in Devon and in Cornwall.
But a kingdom may have too much hinterland. Scotland taxed for
centuries the assimilative capacity of united England; it was too much
for Northumbria to digest. Northumbria's supremacy was distinguished
by the religious labours of Aidan and Cuthbert and Wilfrid in England,
by the missions of Willibrord on the Continent, and by the revival of
literature and learning under Caedmon and Bede; but it spent its
substance in efforts to conquer Scotland, and then fell a victim to the
barbaric strength of Mercia and to civil strife between its component
parts, Bernicia and Deira. Mercia was even less homogeneous than
Northumbria; it had no frontiers worth mention; and in spite of its
military prowess it could not absorb a hinterland treble the size of the
Wales which troubled Edward I. Wessex, with serviceable frontiers
consisting of the Thames, the Cotswolds, the Severn, and the sea, and
with a hinterland narrowing down to the Cornish peninsula, developed
a slower but more lasting strength. Political organization seems to have
been its forte, and it had set its own house in some sort of order before
it was summoned by Ecgberht to assume the lead in English politics.
From that day to this the sceptre has remained in his house without a
permanent break.
Some slight semblance of political unity was thus achieved, but it was
already threatened by the Northmen and Danes, who were harrying
England in much the same way as the English, three centuries earlier,
had harried Britain. The invaders were invaded because they had
forsaken the sea to fight one another on land; and then Christianity had
come to tame their turbulent vigour. A wave of missionary zeal from
Rome and a backwash from unconquered Ireland had met at the synod
of Whitby in 664, and Roman priests recovered what Roman soldiers

had lost. But the church had not yet armed itself with the weapons of
the world, and Christian England was no more a match than Christian
Britain had been for a heathen foe. Ecgberht's feeble successors in
Wessex, and their feebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way
step by step before the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred
the Great was, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the
recesses of his disappearing realm.
Wessex, however, was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had
been; the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and
Alfred was made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was
typical of Wessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than
supreme ability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness.
After hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader
Guthrum. England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from
London to Chester, was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and
Guthrum succumbed to the pacifying influence of Christianity. Not the
least of Alfred's gains