Edward the Elder begins an offensive War against the Danes, and secures his Conquests by Fortifications-Edward is acknowledged Overlord by the whole Island - Battle of Brunanburh-Conquest of Strathclyde-The Policy of Edgar and Dunstan. Reign of Elder. On the death of Alfred, his eldest son Edward, commonly called Edward the Elder, became king of the West-Saxons. His accession was opposed by his cousin Ethelwald, the son of Alfred's elder brother Ethelred; but this prince found little or no support among the English, and had to take refuge among the Northumbrian Danes. By them he was accepted as king, and, crossing into East-Anglia, planned an invasion of Wessex. The Danes crossed the Thames at Cricklade and harried Wiltshire, but were forced to retreat by the strategy of Edward, who met their invasion of Wessex by an attack upon their own settlements across the Watling Street. Returning in hot haste, Ethelwald and his friends threw themselves on the Kentish division of Edward's army, and in the fight Ethelwald was slain; so that, though the Danes were victorious, the movement in his favour came to an end. Peace was then made, and appears to have been fairly kept till 910. Edward the Elder was not so distinguished as his father in the arts of peace, but he was one of the greatest warriors that ever sat on the English throne. Discarding the title of king of the West-Saxons, he styled himself king of the English or Anglo-Saxons, and set before himself the task of bringing the whole island under his sway. In this he was aided by his sister Ethelfleda and her husband Ethelred, Ethelfleda. the ealdorman of the Mercians, who had taken a most distinguished part in the fighting of the last reign. The Five Edward's tions. The strength of the Danes south of the Humber lay in two districts: the valley of the Trent, where they held the strong towns of Leicester, Nottingham, and Derby, which with Stamford and Lincoln Boroughs. were known as the Five Danish Boroughs; and the valley of the upper Ouse, where they held Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Bedford. In 907 the first forward step was taken by repairing the Roman fortifications at Chester, which had lain desolate since the victory of Ethelfrith. Chester, on the Watling Street, commanded the crossing of the Dee and the shortest road from Northumbria to Wales; it was also the best port by which the Northmen of Ireland could communicate with their friends in England, and was therefore a place of great strategical importance. In 912 Ethelred died, and Edward took into his own hands the lower part of the Thames valley with the towns of Oxford and London, while his sister, who was now called the Lady of the Mercians, ruled the rest of her husband's territory. The business of fortification now went on apace; sometimes it took the form of casting up a great mound in some defensible position, sometimes of repairing Roman work, and in a few cases towns were surrounded with new stone walls. In these, new settlers were placed with orders to defend the adjoining territory, and in this way the work of reconquest, if slow, was sure. Ethelfleda secured her end of the Watling Street against the Danes by the fortresses of Stafford, Tamworth, Eddisbury, and Runcorn, and against the Welsh by that of Bridgenorth; in like manner Edward built Hertford, Witham, and Buckingham. Warwick was built by Ethelfleda to guard the Fosseway, and, the line of communication being secure, an advance Conquest of Danes south was made against the Danish strongholds. Edward took Bedford and Huntingdon, and compelled the men of Northampton and Cambridge to keep the peace; Ethelfleda captured Derby and Leicester. In 918 Ethelfleda died, and then Edward took the whole of Mercia into his hands. The fall of Nottingham and Stamford followed, and at these places and at Bedford Edward built a new English quarter to keep the old inhabitants in check. His next step was to push forward from Chester and seize Manchester on the road to York, and to fortify Bakewell in the Peak country, which secured the passes into Northumbria and connected Manchester with Derby and Nottingham. That done, he seems to have been preparing for a fresh invasion of the north, when he was met at Dore, on the road from Bakewell to Sheffield, by offers of submission. These came not only from of the Humber. the Danes of York, but also from the English kingdom of Bernicia, which had never been overrun by the Danes, from the Edward's Welsh of Strathclyde, and even from the king of the Overlordship Scots. All these swore to take him as 'father and lord.' acknowledged by As in 922 he had been taken as overlord by the three the whole princes of North Wales, Edward had now succeeded in establishing some sort of authority over the whole island, except, perhaps, over the Northmen, who occupied settlements in the extreme north, and who had long been the terror of the Scots; Island. Character of north of the Forth, however, he can hardly be regarded Edward's as having had much authority, though at a later date very great stress was laid on this submission of the Scots. Overlordship. Shires. Within his own dominions Edward carried out the work of organisation which his father had begun. The old tribal divisions of the Midland English, which had been obliterated by the Danes, were Construcreplaced by a new division into shires, of which Edward's tion of new forts and the chief Danish towns became as a rule the centres, and give such names as Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire. This rearrangement is a matter of inference; but of the chief events of Edward's reign we have the fullest information from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which in his time is singularly graphic. Edward died in 925, and was succeeded by his son Athelstan. This king was a man of great courage and ability, and under him the work of consolidating the kingdom went on without interruption. Reign of Athelstan's first act was to give his sister in marriage to Athelstan. Sihtric, the Danish king of Northumbria; and on his death, two years later, Athelstan took his kingdom and drove into exile his two sons. In the south Athelstan extended his frontier by destroying the independence of the Welsh inhabitants of Exeter, and making the Tamar the boundary between England and Cornwall. He also exacted a money tribute from the princes of Wales. Trouble, however, soon arose in the north. Constantine, king of Scots, aided the sons of Sihtric, and in 933 Athelstan invaded that country and apparently reduced Constantine to submission; but in 937 'the hoary warrior, the old deceiver,' was again in arms and at the head of a conspiracy in which the Danes, the Scots, and the Welsh of Strathclyde banded themselves together with the aid of the Northmen of Ireland to throw off the English yoke. Athelstan and his brother Edmund, then a lad of fifteen, met them at the battle of Brunanburh, and completely routed the confederates in a fight so bloody that it was known for years as 'the great battle,' and was celebrated by the chronicler in one of the Battle of burh. finest outbursts of Old English song. Of the details of the fight, and even of its geographical position, we are, however, ignorant; some fixing the neighbourhood of the Humber, others that of the Mersey, as its site. Great, however, as was his victory, it is doubtful whether Athelstan's power over the Danelaw was as great after it as it had been before. The importance of Athelstan's position and the high estimation in which Greatness of he was held by his neighbours is shown by the marriages Atheistan. contracted by his sisters. One was the wife of Charles the Simple; another of Otto, son of Henry the Fowler; and a third of Hugh the Great, Count of Paris. Like his grandfather, Athelstan was a lawgiver, and portions of his code, which have come down to us, shed much light on the social conditions of the time. Reign of Edmund. Strathclyde Athelstan died in 940, and was succeeded by his brother Edmund, aged eighteen. His accession was the signal for a general rising of the Danes, and both those of Northumbria and those of the Five Boroughs threw off their allegiance and sent for Anlaf of Ireland, who had fought at Brunanburh, to be their king. However, after some fighting Edmund regained his authority in both districts. Conquest of The chief exploit of Edmund was the conquest of StrathStrathclyde. clyde. This he effected in 945, when the Welsh king Dunmail was routed in a pass between Grasmere and Thirlmere, where the memorial pile of stones raised on the field may be seen at the present day. Edmund granted Strathclyde to Malcolm, king of Scots, to be held by him 'as his fellow-worker as well by sea as by land.' The district so dealt with comprised all the land that lay between the river Derwent in Cumberland and the Firth of Clyde, and was bounded, inland, by the Pennine range of hills and the forest of Ettrick. How far Strathclyde was then really British is unknown; now, at any rate, the place-names, though many of them are Celtic, point to a large immigration of English and Northmen, and the only relic of the Celtic speech is preserved in the numerals used by some of the shepherds for counting sheep. It is thought that the anglicising of the district was also facilitated by a large emigration of the Celtic inhabitants to Wales. Edmund had only reigned six years when he was slain by a robber; but his title of Magnificent-that is, the doer of great deeds-marks the estimation in which he was held by his countrymen. Reign of Edmund was succeeded by his brother Edred. The reign of this king, though short, is in every way remarkable, for it brought to a close the long struggle with the Danelaw, and once more established the authority of the West-Saxon kings upon a firm footing. Edred. The method of his accession serves to mark the progress that had already been made towards national unity; for Edred was chosen by a witenagemot in which sat Englishmen, Welshmen, and Danes, and he was consecrated by the two archbishops of Canterbury and York. The north submitted quietly to his rule, and the Scots renewed their oath of allegiance. Aided, however, by their kinsmen in Denmark, the Northumbrians, with Archbishop Wulfstan at their head, ventured to throw off their allegiance; but Edred's vengeance was so severe that submission soon followed, and the archbishop was removed to a less dangerous see in the south of England. Then Edred became full king in Northumbria, and the semi-independence of the north came to an end. In the last year of his short reign Edred took the title not only of king of the Anglo-Saxons but of Cæsar of Britain-an assumption which marks the attainment of the highest dignity possessed by the Old English kings. Instead of dividing his new dominions into shires, as had been done with the southern parts of the Danelaw, the region north of the Humber was divided into two earldoms, one of Earldoms. which, now or a little later, was intrusted to the king of Scots; the other, from the Tweed to the Humber, was given to Osulf, an Englishman. Edred was never a strong man, and after a reign of nine years he died in 955. New Dunstan. During the reign of Edred his chief adviser and friend was Dunstan, the most remarkable English subject who lived before the Norman Conquest. This wonderful man was born in Somerset and educated at the monastery of Glastonbury, where he had the advantage of the teaching of the learned Irishmen who were in the habit of visiting that shrine. Being by birth well connected, Dunstan soon made his appearance at court; but the jealousy of his talents which was shown by the other courtiers made his life so unpleasant that he was forced to withdraw for a time, and became a monk. Edmund, however, recalled him to court and made him abbot of Glastonbury, and under his successor Dunstan acted as the leading adviser of the king, accompanied him on his campaigns, and became guardian of the royal treasure. The rest of his time was given to education, and he and his friend Ethelwold, abbot of Abingdon, set on foot a revival of learning in the south of England which may be compared with the similar movement in Northumbria of which Caedmon and Bede were the chief ornaments. At Edred's death the crown reverted to Edwy, the elder son of King Edmund. The new sovereign was a boy of fifteen, whose character was quite unformed, and he appears to have been a mere tool in the hands of E |