THE ENGLAND OF ECGBERHT

      FEW periods of our history seem drearier and more unprofitable to one who follows the mere course of political events than the two hundred years which close with the submission of the English states to Ecgberht. The petty and ineffectual strife of the Three Kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex, presents few features of human interest, while we are without the means of explaining the sudden revolutions which raise and depress their power, or their final subsidence into isolation and inaction. It is only when we view it from within that we see the importance of the time. It was, in fact, an age of revolution – an age in which mighty changes were passing over every phase of the life of Englishmen; an age in which heathendom was passing into Christianity, the tribal king into the national ruler, the ætheling into the thegn; an age in which Eng lish society saw the beginnings of the change which transformed the noble into a lord, and the free ceorl into a dependent or a serf; an age in which new moral conceptions told on the fabric of our early jurisprudence, and in which custom began to harden into written law. Without, the new England again became a member of the European commonwealth; while within, the very springs of national life were touched by the mingling of new blood with the blood of the nation itself.

      The ethnological character of the country had, in fact, changed since the close of the age of conquest. The area of the ground subject to English rule was far greater than in the days of Ceawlin or Æthelfrith, but in the character of its population the portion added was very different from the earlier area; for while the Britons had been wholly driven off from the eastern half of the island, in the western part they remained as subjects of the conquerors. It was thus that in Ecgberht's day Britain had come to consist of three long belts of country, two of which stretched side by side from the utmost north to the utmost south, and the population of each of which was absolutely diverse. Between the eastern coast and a line which we may draw along the Selkirk and Yorkshire moorlands to the Cotswolds and Selwood, lay a people of wholly English blood. Westward again of the Tamar, of the western hills of Herefordshire, and of Offa's Dyke, lay a people whose blood was wholly Celtic. Between them, from the Lune to the coast of Dorset and Devon, ran the lands of the Wealhcyn – of folks, that is, in whose veins British and English blood were already blending together and presaging in their mingling a wider blending of these elements in the nation as a whole.

      The winning of Western Britain opened, in fact, a way to that addition of outer elements to the pure English stock which has gone on from that day to this without a break. Celt and Gael, Welshman and Irishman, Frisian and Flamand, French Huguenot and German Palatine, have come successively in, with a hundred smaller streams of foreign blood. The intermingling of races has nowhere been less hindered by national antipathy; and even the hindrances interposed by law, such as Offa's prohibition of marriage between English and Welsh, or Edward III.'s prohibition of marriage between English and Irish, have met with the same disregard. The result is, that, so far as blood goes, few nations are of an origin more mixed than the present English nation; for there is no living Englishman who can say with certainty that the blood of any of the races we have named does not mingle in his veins. As regards the political or social structure of the people, indeed, this intermingling of blood has had little or no result. They remain purely English and Teutonic. The firm English groundwork which had been laid by the character of the early conquest has never been disturbed. Gathered gradually in, tribe by tribe, fugitive by fugitive, these outer elements were quietly absorbed into a people whose social and political form was already fixed. But though it would be hard to distinguish the changes wrought by the mixture of race from the changes wrought by the lapse of time and the different circumstances which surround each generation, there can be no doubt that it has brought with it moral results in modifying the character of the nation. It is not without significance that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in their largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English borderland, in the forest of Arden.

      Side by side with this change in the character of its population had gone on a change in the character of the country itself. Its outer appearance, indeed, still remained much the same as in earlier days. Not half its soil had as yet been brought under tillage; as the traveller passed along its roads, vast reaches of forest, of moor, of fen, formed the main landscape before him; even the open and tilled districts were broken everywhere by woods and thickets which the farmer needed for his homestead, for his fences, for his house-building, and his fire. But limited as was its cultivation, Britain was no longer the mere sheet of woodland and waste which the English had found it. Population had increased, and four hundred years of labor had done their work in widening the clearings and thinning the woods. We have already caught glimpses of such a work in the moorlands of the North, in the fens of the Wash, in the thickets of Arden, as the monk carried his axe into the forest, or the thegn planted tillers over the grants that had been carved for him out of the waste "folkland." The study of such a tract as the Andreds weald would show the same ceaseless struggle with nature – Sussex-men and Surrey-men mounting over the South-downs and the North-downs to hew their way forward to the future meeting of their shirebounds in the heart of the Weald, while the vast herds of swine that formed the advance guard of the Cantwara, who were cleaving their way westward along the Medway, pushed into the "dens" or glades in the woodland beyond.

      We can see the general results of this industrial warfare in a single district, such as Dorset. When the English landed in Britain no tract was wilder or less civilized; its dense forest-reaches, in fact, checked the westward advance of the conquerors, and forced them to make their way slowly along the coast from the Stour to the Exe. Even when the Dorsætan were fairly settled there, the names of their hundreds and of the trysting-places of their courts show the wild state of the land. The hundred-moots gather at barrow or den, at burn or ford, in comb or vale, in glade or woodland, here beside some huge boulder or stone, there on the line of a primeval foss-dyke, or beneath some mighty and sacred tree. But even its hundred names show how soon the winning of the land began. Dorchester tells of the new life growing up on the Roman ruins; Knolton and Gillingham of the new "tons" and "hams" which rose about the settlements of the conquerors; while Beaminster, Yetminster, and Christchurch recall the work of the new Christendom that settled at last on the soil. Nowhere, indeed, was the industrial work of the Church more energetic; we have seen how Ealdhelm planted centres of agriculture as well as of religion at Sherborne and Wareham, and if more than a third of the shire belonged in later days to the clergy, it was in the main because monk and priest had been foremost in the reclamation of the land. Much, indeed, remained to be done. As late as the eve of the Norman conquest, but thirty or forty thousand inhabitants were scattered over the soil; the king's forest-rights stretched over wild and waste throughout half the county, and even in the parts that had been won for culture, scrub and brushwood broke the less fruitful ground, while relics of the vanished woodland lingered in the copses beside every homestead, the "pannage woods" of beech and oak, and the "barren woods" of other timber that gave no mast to the swineherd.

      But in spite of all, the work of civilization had begun. Little boroughs that, small as they were, already formed centres of social and industrial life were rising beside the harbors of the coast or clustering under the shelter of the great abbeys. Even where the bulk of the land lay waste, pastures stretched along the lower slopes of the moorland, whose herbage, though too rough and broken for the scythe, gave fair grazing ground to the herds of the township, while by stream and river ran the meadow-lands of homestead after homestead, clear of shrub and thicket, girt in by ditch and fence. About the homestead stretched the broad acres of the corn-land, with gangs of eight oxen, each dragging its plough through the furrows. All the features of English life, in fact all its characteristic figures, were already there. We see mills grinding along the burns, the hammer rings in the village smithy, the thegn's hall rises out of its demesne, the parish priest is at his mass-book in the little church that forms the centre of every township, reeves are gathering their lord's dues, forester and verderer wake the silent woodland with hound and horn, the moot gathers for order and law beneath the sacred oak or by the gray stone on the moor, along the shore the well-to-do saltmen are busy with their salt-pans, and the fishers are washing their nets in the little coast hamlets, and setting apart the due of fish for their lords.

      Side by side, however, with this industrial change in the temper and aspect of the country, was going on a far more profound change in its moral life. We have already...