With the dawn of the ninth century came further development. During the 200 years or so of the so-called Heptarchy, a gradual and continuous movement of cohesion—social as well as political—had been in progress. The strength of the Anglo-Saxon was his courage, a determination and persistence hardly distinguishable from obstinacy; his weakness was his lack of imagination and his narrow political horizon. He had never learnt to think nationally, hardly even tribally, far less imperially; his thoughts centred themselves in the little hamlet or home settlement where all were kin at least, if not kind. He took
the rustic murmur of his bourg
For the great wave that echoed round the world.
And if he thought of his fellow-countrymen at all, apart from family blood-feuds which called for vengeance, it was probably in the exclusive spirit of Jacques:
I do desire we may be better strangers.
These individualistic ideas were being slowly modified by existing conditions: families had been grouped into tythings, tythings into hundreds, hundreds into shires; the communal system of land tenure was merging into the manorial system, and with the consolidation of individual kingdoms came a struggle for political supremacy and a movement towards national cohesion and unity. It was the glory of a Wessex king, ruling in Winchester, to render this conception an accomplished fact.
It was at the Court of the great Charlemagne that Egbert gained his political training and insight. Forced as a youth to flee from Wessex, he had been made welcome at the Emperor’s Court, and there in the centre of great world-movements, in a Court which numbered the most accomplished scholars of the time, Egbert began to ‘see things.’ When in 802 A.D. he was called to ascend the throne of Wessex, Charlemagne, it is said, gave him his own sword as a parting gift, but something far more potent—political insight and training—was his already.
Egbert set himself not only to consolidate his power in Wessex, but to weld the separate jangling factions into one under his personal supremacy. The details of this long struggle are part of English history and do not concern us here: suffice it that he asserted the supremacy of Wessex over the whole land, and it is in connection with him that the term England—Angleland—was first used. In 829 A.D. he held a council at Winchester and proclaimed himself King of Angleland.
Winchester thus entered on a new phase, as capital of England and not of Wessex merely, and its importance rapidly developed.
It was well for the land that internal union was thus in sight, for with Egbert’s reign a new danger arose. The migratory racial movements of which the coming to Britain of Jute, Angle, and Saxon was but a phase, had never ceased, but the conditions had altered. In earlier unsettled days new-comers as they crossed the Swan’s Bath had been usually welcomed as allies, now when the land had become settled, when wealth had accumulated in town and monastery, the late-comers came in guise of a foreign foe. Egbert’s reign saw a great revival of the descents of these Danes or Northmen as they were called. Wherever their ‘aescas’ or longships appeared panic seized the countryside. Murder, outrage, conflagration, and ruin were the ordinary incidents of a Viking raid. Men might well pray as they did, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us,” for the invader knew nothing of mercy, and his enterprise and desperate valour were only equalled by his fiendish delight in cruelty. Egbert struggled long, and, on the whole, successfully, against these foes. In 839 he died, after a reign of thirty-seven years, and his bones are still preserved in a mortuary chest in the Cathedral of his capital.
The words on the chest are: