CHAPTER XIV
THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE SEA-ROVERS
It is in the reign of King Egbert that we begin to hear of the Danes coming as sea-rovers and raiding the coasts on both sides of the English Channel. They came, they harried and stole, and went away again.
Alfred the Great
That was bad. But it began to be worse when they did not go away again, when they came in such numbers that they could actually dare to establish themselves for the winter up some river. They had then come to stay. Within thirty years after the death of Egbert they became so strong that they took the towns of York and Nottingham. The English kingdom was again, at this time, disunited. This was partly owing to the custom—which proved fatal to the union, of the continental empire also—for a king, at his death, to divide up his kingdom, by will, and give portions to two or more of his sons. But in a fortunate hour for England, Alfred, who won the name of "the Great," came to the throne of Wessex in 871.
He fought the Danes on land, uniting the people of Kent and Essex with his own Wessex men. He fought them with varying success, on the whole getting the better of them. He also (and you might make a note of this as the beginning of Britain's naval power) defeated some of their ships with his own fleet.
Whereupon came many more Danes with many more ships; and English and Danes had to meet in many a battle and skirmish until a decisive victory at length enabled Alfred to come to a settlement with them. Even so, the settlement was far from establishing him as sovereign over all England. An arrangement was made by which the Danes were to occupy, undisturbed, the eastern side, and were to leave the English in peaceable possession of the west. We have spoken before of that old Roman road called Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester: you may take that line as about the boundary line between the two peoples who now held England.
Alfred, besides this peaceful settlement with the Danes, owes his claim to the title of "great" to the wisdom with which he settled the affairs of his own kingdom and for the favour that he showed to literature and culture of all kinds. He was a Christian, and had insisted, when he made his treaty with the Danes, that they should profess themselves Christians and be baptised. He did all that he could to help in educating his people. He himself made translations into the Anglo-Saxon of books written in Latin giving the description and history of parts of Germany from which some of the Gothic tribes had come. He also caused books on religion to be translated, so that the people who were educated sufficiently to be able to read their own language might study them, and while he rebuilt monasteries and other buildings belonging to the Church, which had been ruined in the perpetual wars, he expected the priests and the Churchmen (the clerics, or clerks) to undertake the education of the people.
Probably Alfred was far too wise to suppose that peace would be kept for long between his Anglo-Saxons on the west of the Watling Street and the Danes on the east. The Danes were of a race akin to the Anglo-Saxons and to the Franks—they were German or Gothic. The Romans and Anglo-Saxons themselves had both come into Britain as quite a different race from the inhabitants whom they conquered; but the Danes were of nearly the same stock as those whom they found, and harassed, in England. Both were of that race called Nordic, of which it was characteristic for the men to be tall and large, with fair hair and blue eyes. We have seen how the English were gradually losing their freedom under their earls or thanes. The Danes came in with their freedom little if any less than it ever had been. They were hardy and independent; and even to this day we find these qualities to be characteristic of the dwellers in those lands east of the Watling Street in which most of the Danes settled. The southern and western men are of a tamer character.
