pwards of three centuries had elapsed since the departure of the Roman legions from Britain, and the presumedly first regularly organised invasion of the island by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, when a new enemy of the same Teutonic blood and language appeared upon her shores. The country had been but partially conquered by the first Teutonic invaders. Picts and Scots held their own in Ireland and that portion of Great Britain to the north of the estuaries of the Clyde and the Forth. The Britons were not only masters in old Cornwall and in a more extended territory than is now included in the present principality of Wales, but they remained dominant in Strathclyde and Cumberland, which comprised the lands on the western side of the island between the Clyde estuary and Morecambe Bay. Christianity had become the recognised religious faith of both the Britons and the Teutons, but the newly arrived kinsmen of the latter were still worshippers of Odin, and marched to battle with his sacred "totem" or cognizance, the "swart raven" emblazoned on their banners. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the date 787, says—"This year king Bertric took to wife Eadburga, King Offa's daughter; and in his days first came three ships of Northmen, out of Hœretha-land [Denmark.] And then the reve rode to the place, and would have driven them to the king's town, because he knew not who they were: and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men which sought the land of the English nation." These three ships landed in Dorsetshire, and the gerefa or reve, named Beaduheard, of Dorchester, supposed them to be contraband traders rather than pirates. This mistake cost him his life, as well as the lives of the whole of his retinue.
The conflicts which followed for many years afterwards between these heathen pirates and their Christianised kinsmen were characterised by deeds of remorseless atrocity as well as of indomitable valour. Truly, every now relatively civilized nation has had to pass through what may not be inaptly termed its Bashi-Bazouk stage of culture before from it evolved its present more highly developed intellectual and moral human features. Mr. Jno. R. Green ("Short History of the English People,") sums up the more prominent characteristics of this internecine strife as follows:—
"The first sight of the Danes is as if the hand of the dial of history had gone back three hundred years. The same Norwegian fiords, the same Frisian sandbanks, pour forth their pirate fleets as in the days of Hengest and Cerdic. There is the same wild panic as the black boats of the invaders strike inland along the river reaches, or moor round the river islets, the same sights of horror—firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place—as when the English invaders attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden, for the Danes were still heathen. Letters, arts, religion, governments disappeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of old. But when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still remained England; the Danes sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between men of different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishmen and Welshmen. The Danes were the same people in blood and speech with the people they attacked; and were in fact Englishmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the Northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and complete."
The chief Danish ravages for nearly a century were confined to the southern coast and the coast of East Anglia. In 855, the Chronicle says—"The heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey." In 867, it records that "this year the Danish army went from East Anglia over the mouth of the Humber to York, in North-humbria. And there was much dissention among that people, and they had cast out their king Osbert, and had taken to themselves a king, Ælla, not of royal blood; but late in the year they resolved that they would fight against the army, and therefore they gathered a large force, and fought the army at the town of York, and stormed the town, and some of them got within and there was an excessive slaughter made of the North-humbrians, some within, some without, and the kings were both slain, and the remainder made peace with the army."
Some writers say that Ælla was put to death with the most frightful tortures in revenge for similar cruel treatment, on his part, of his conquered foe, Ragnar Lodbrock, by the three sons of that somewhat mythical hero, named Halfden, Ingwar, and Hubba, who commanded the expedition. The story runs that Ragnar, being taken prisoner by Ælla, was thrown into a dungeon, and bitten to death by vipers. This Ragnar, however, has proved so troublesome to northern scholars, that many regard him as a mythical personage, belonging to an earlier, or what they term the "heroic period." Scandinavian reliable history only dates from about the middle of the ninth century. Ælla usurped the Northumbrian throne in the year 862, and Mr. J. A. Blackwell, in his edition of Mallett's "Northern Antiquities," says "Ragnar's death is placed by Suhm, who has brought it down to the latest possible epoch, in 794, and by other writers at a much earlier period." Some of the deeds attributed to this hero are unquestionably mythical. From the "Death Song," said to have been written by him, but which Mr. Blackwell regards as more probably the composition of a Skald of the ninth century, we learn that Ragnar succeeded, like Indra, Perseus, St. George, and other solar heroes, in conquering a monster serpent that held in captivity Thora, the daughter of a chieftain of Gothland, and received the lady in marriage, as the reward of his prowess. In order to protect himself against the serpent's venom, it is said that Ragnar "put on shaggy trousers, from which circumstance he was afterwards called Lodbrok (Shaggy-brogues)." Be this as it may, Ingwar, his presumed son, on the defeat of Ælla and Osbert, ascended the Northumbrian throne, and the Danes remained masters of the situation, until the partition of the kingdom between Godrun and Alfred the Great gave them peaceful possession of the territory. In the year 876, Halfden, a famous Danish viking, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "appropriated the lands of Northumbria; and they thenceforth continued ploughing and tilling them." Consequently, from this period, the great mass of the men of Scandinavian blood in Northumbria must be regarded rather in the light of emigrants or settlers than roving pirates, although, doubtless, with them the sword was always ready to supersede the ploughshare whenever the arrival of a fleet of their buccaneering relatives on the coast afforded an opportunity for a successful foray on the lands of their Anglo-Saxon neighbours.
On the death of Edward the Elder, in the year 925, the "right royal" grandson of the Great Alfred, the "golden haired" Athelstan, succeeded to the kingdom of Wessex and its dependencies, which included the whole of England south of the Humber and the Mersey, with the exception of Cornwall and East Anglia, and the "overlordship" of the whole of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish rulers, as well as those of the Welsh and Scots, whose kings rendered him homage and acknowledged him the legitimate successor to his father Edward, whom they regarded as "their Father, Lord, and Protector." Edward the Elder was, at the time of his highest prosperity, unquestionably the most powerful "Bretwalda" or "overlord" that had ruled in Britain since the departure of the Romans.
Soon after Athelstan's succession, however, the kings of the present Principality, or North Wales, as the whole country from the Severn to the Dee was then called, rebelled against the authority of the hated fair-haired Sassenach. Athelstan instantly attacked Edwall Voel, king of Gwynnedd, and wrested the entire sovereignty of his dominion from him. He, however, on the submission of the other Welsh princes, and their performance of homage to him at his court held at Hereford, generously restored it to him. Afterwards the country between the Severn and the Wye were added to Mercia, and a heavy tribute was imposed on all the revolted Welsh monarchs. Twenty pounds weight of gold and three hundred pounds of silver were to be yearly paid into the treasury, or, as it was then styled, the "Hoard" of the "King of London." To this was to be added an annual gift of twenty thousand beeves and the swiftest hounds and hawks that the country possessed.
The Cornish Britons, or West Welsh, as they were then termed, were afterwards subdued, and thus all Britain south of the Humber and the Mersey again acknowledged Athelstan's supremacy or "overlordship."
In the year 925, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle informs us that Athelstan and Sihtric (or Sigtryg), king of the North-humbrians, "came together at Tamworth, on the 3rd before the Kalends of February; and Athelstan gave him his sister." But this marriage failed to secure the proposed future alliance between the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon sovereigns. The Dane, who had embraced Christianity, relapsed into the faith of his forefathers and returned his wife to her former home. Sihtric's death, however, intervened between the repudiation of Queen Editha, who afterwards became Abbess of Tamworth, and the vengeance of Athelstan, which fell upon Anlaf and Godefrid, sons of Sihtric by a former marriage. Anlaf fled to Ireland, on the east coast of which the Danes held the supreme authority, and his brother sought refuge with Constantine, king of the Scots. Referring to these events the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says—"A. 926. This year fiery lights appeared in the north part of the heavens. And Sihtric perished; and king Athelstan obtained the kingdom of the North-humbrians. And he ruled all the kings who were in the island; first, Howel, king of the West-Welsh; and Constantine, king of the Scots; and Owen, king of the Monmouth people; and Aldred, son of Ealdulf, of Bambrough: and they confirmed the peace by pledge, and by oaths, at the place which is called Eamot, on the 4th before the Ides of July; and they renounced all idolatry, and after that submitted to him in peace."