24 THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLAND Mercian leadership perished with the great king. A new dynasty was rising in southern England and the hopes of the Anglo-Saxons came to be centered about the kingdom of Wessex, with whose leadership the history of the English kingdom begins. REFERENCES GEOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH ISLES. - Cheyney, Short History of England, c. i; Cross, History of England, c. i; George, Relations of Geography and History, c. x; Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas. THE EARLIEST INHABITANTS OF GREAT BRITAIN. Cross, 11-18; Fletcher, Introductory History of England, I, Part i, c. i; Ransome, Advanced History of England, 3-9; Tout, Advanced History of Great Britain, 1-5. EARLY ANGLO-SAXON INSTITUTIONS. - Fletcher, I, i, 27-38; Ransome, 40-50; Walker, Essentials in English History, c. iv. CHAPTER II THE OLD ENGLISH MONARCHY 23. The Northmen in Britain. In the ninth century the tide of immigration once more began to flow toward the British Isles. This time the invaders were Northmen, or Danes, as the English preferred to call them, though all the Scandinavian tribes evidently joined in the attack. The viking movement may be regarded as a belated wave of the Germanic migrations. The purpose was the same: the acquisition of new homes in a more favored clime. Due east of the Shetland and the Orkney Islands lies the southern part of Norway, and from this region the westward movement seems to have begun. The islands Scandinavian mentioned and northern Scotland were the terri- settlements. tories first occupied; thence the stream of settlement flowed on to the Hebrides, down the west coast of Scotland, and across to eastern Ireland and the Isle of Man. Later, Norwegian settlers appeared north of the Humber and Danes in the East Anglian kingdom. It will thus be seen that parts of both the eastern and the western shores of the island were being visited and seized. Like the Anglo-Saxons the Scandinavian invaders were of Teutonic blood and spoke a Germanic dialect with enough points of resemblance to the Old English to make Civilization of it possible for the two peoples to learn each other's the Northmen. language without great effort. In religion the Northmen were still heathen, worshiping the old gods that the English had renounced two hundred years earlier. In civilization they occupied a lower stage than the English, though in some respects they were their intellectual equals. In shipbuilding, for 1 Review sec. 15. instance, they soon came to lead Europe, and for several centuries the Norse vikings ruled the European seas. Piracy was common among them, but loot and pillage were not the chief objects of their visits to Britain: it was land-hunger and eco Model of a ship found in 1880 in a burial-mound at Gokstad, Norway, where it had been buried nearly one thousand years before. nomic pressure that led the Northmen to emigrate, though love of adventure and the prospect of sharing in plundered wealth doubtless also proved strong incentives. 24. The Vikings as Conquerors. The earliest recorded visit of the vikings to any of the English kingdoms for the THE VIKING ATTACK ON WESSEX 27 sake of plunder was in 793, when they pillaged the Northumbrian monastery at Lindisfarne. That was toward The attack on the close of Offa's reign as king of Mercia and England. 793. overlord of the English, and while Cynewulf may still have been writing in some Anglian cloister. From that date for a hundred years, English history is an almost unbroken account of warfare with the Scandinavian invaders. It was the custom of the vikings to land and seize the horses in the regions visited, and thus mounted they rode everywhere at will. Some of the English kings made vigorous efforts to defend their lands, but too often they strove in vain. Egbert, the king of Wessex, kept the invaders at bay for a time; but after his death (839) the Angles and Saxons were again hard pressed. In 866 the vikings in England found new leaders in the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok, whom a Northumbrian king is said to have seized and thrown into a den of serpents Conquest of some years before. The fierce brothers wintered Northumbria. with their host in East Anglia. The following year the Danes swept northward across the Humber and crushed Northumbria. They next turned south again into middle England. West Saxons from the south hastened to the aid of the Mercian king, but to no purpose: the men of Mercia submitted, and six years later the Mercian kingdom ceased to exist. Next the Danes stormed into East Anglia where the glorious Edmund was king. He was seized and suffered martyrdom; Mercia and soon he was adored as one of the most powerful East Anglia. saints of the English church; but his kingdom passed to the Danes. In 870, after five years of hostile operations, the northern pirates found themselves in control of all the region from the river Thames northward almost as far as the Firth of Forth. Wessex was now the only surviving Anglo-Saxon state in Britain. Wessex. 802. 25. The Viking Attack on Wessex: Alfred the Great. In those days the throne of Wessex belonged to Egbert king of the family of Egbert, a prince who represented a younger line of the ancient dynasty and became king in 802. |