a few years later, called “Alfred and Guthrum’s frith,” gives
the border as lying from Thames northward up the Lea to its
source, then across to Bedford, and then along the Ouse to
Watling Street, the old Roman road from London to Chester.
This gave King Alfred London and Middlesex, most of Hertfordshire
and Bedfordshire, and the larger half of Mercia—lands that
had never before been an integral part of Wessex, though they
had some time been tributary to her kings. They were now
taken inside the realm and governed by the ealdorman Æthelred,
the king’s son-in-law. The Mercians gladly mingled with the
West Saxons, and abandoned all memories of ancient independence.
Twenty years of schooling under the hand of the
Dane had taught them to forget old particularism.
Alfred’s enlarged kingdom was far more powerful than any one of the three new Danish states which lay beyond the Lea and Watling Street: it was to be seen, ere another generation was out, that it was stronger than all three together. But Alfred was not to see the happy day when York and Lincoln, Colchester and Leicester, were to become mere shire-capitals in the realm of United England.
The fourteen years of comparative peace which he now enjoyed were devoted to perfecting the military organization of his enlarged kingdom. His fleet was reconstructed: in 882 he went out with it in person and destroyed a small piratical squadron: in 885 we hear of it coasting Alfred’s reforms. all along Danish East Anglia. But his navy was not yet strong enough to hold off all raids: it was not till the very end of his reign that he perfected it by building “long ships that were nigh twice as large as those of the heathen; some had 60 oars, some more; and they were both steadier and swifter and lighter than the others, and were shaped neither after the Frisian nor after the Danish fashion, but as it seemed to himself that they would be most handy.” This great war fleet he left as a legacy to his son, but he himself in his later campaigns had only its first beginnings at his disposal.
His military reforms were no less important. Warned by the failures of the English against Danish entrenched camps, he introduced the long-neglected art of fortification, and built many “burhs”—stockaded fortresses on mounds by the waterside—wherein dwelt permanent garrisons of military settlers. It would seem that the system by which he maintained them was that he assigned to each a region of which the inhabitants were responsible for its manning and its sustentation. The landowners had either to build a house within it for their own inhabiting, or to provide that a competent substitute dwelt there to represent them. These “burh-ware,” or garrison-men, are repeatedly mentioned in Alfred’s later years. The old national levy of the “fyrd” was made somewhat more serviceable by an ordinance which divided it into two halves, one of which must take the field when the other was dismissed. But it would seem that the king paid even more attention to another military reform—the increase of the number of the professional fighting class, the thegnhood as it was now called. All the wealthier men, both in the countryside and in the towns, were required to take up the duties as well as the privileges of membership of the military household of the king. They became “of thegn-right worthy” by receiving, really or nominally, a place in the royal hall, with the obligation to take the field whenever their master raised his banner. The document which defines their duties and privileges sets forth that “every ceorl who throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm, and a mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold, was to be reckoned gesithcund.” A second draft allowed the man who had the military equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into the list, and also “the merchant who has fared thrice over the high seas at his own expense.” How far the details of the scheme are Alfred’s own, how far they were developed by his son Edward the Elder, it is unfortunately impossible to say. But there is small doubt that the system was working to some extent in the later wars of the great king, and that his successes were largely due to the fact that his army contained a larger nucleus of fully armed warriors than those of his predecessors.
Military reforms were only one section of the work of King Alfred during the central years of his reign. It was then that he set afoot his numerous schemes for the restoration of the learning and culture of England which had sunk so low during the long years of disaster which had preceded his accession. How he gathered scholars from the continent, Wales and Ireland; how he collected the old heroic poems of the nation, how he himself translated books from the Latin tongue, started schools, and set his scribes to write up the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is told elsewhere, as are his mechanical inventions, his buildings, and his dealings with missionaries and explorers (see Alfred).
The test of the efficiency of his work was that it held firm when, in his later years, the Danish storm once more began to beat against the shores of Wessex. In the years 892–896 Alfred was assailed from many sides at once by viking fleets, of which the most important was that led by the great freebooter Hasting. Moreover, the settled Danes of eastern England broke their oaths and gave the invaders assistance. Yet the king held his own, with perfect success if not with ease. The enemy was checked, beaten off, followed up rapidly whenever he changed his base of operation, and hunted repeatedly all across England. The campaigning ranged from Appledore in Kent to Exeter, from Chester to Shoeburyness; but wherever the invaders transferred themselves, either the king, or his son Edward, or his son-in-law Ethelred, the ealdorman of Mercia, was promptly at hand with a competent army. The camps of the Danes were stormed, their fleet was destroyed in the river Lea in 895, and at last the remnant broke up and dispersed, some to seek easier plunder in France, others to settle down among their kinsmen in Northumbria or East Anglia.
Alfred survived for four years after his final triumph in 896, to complete the organization of his fleet and to repair the damages done by the last four years of constant fighting. He died on the 26th of October 900, leaving Wessex well armed for the continuance of the struggle, and the inhabitants of the “Danelagh” much broken in spirit. They saw that it would never be in their power to subdue all England. Within a few years they were to realize that it was more probable that the English kings would subdue them.
The house of Wessex continued to supply a race of hard-fighting
and capable monarchs, who went on with Alfred’s work.
His son, Edward the Elder, and his three grandsons,
Æthelstan, Edmund and Edred, devoted themselves
for fifty-five years (A.D. 900–955) to the task of conquering
Edward
the Elder.
the Danelagh, and ended by making England into
a single unified kingdom, not by admitting the conquered
to homage and tribute, in the old style of the 7th century, but
by their complete absorption. The process was not so hard as
might be thought; when once the Danes had settled down,
had brought over wives from their native land or taken them
from among their English vassals, had built themselves farmsteads
and accumulated flocks and herds, they lost their old
advantage in contending with the English. Their strength
had been their mobility and their undisputed command of the
sea. But now they had possessions of their own to defend, and
could not raid at large in Wessex or Mercia without exposing
their homes to similar molestation. Moreover, the fleet which
Alfred had built, and which his successors kept up, disputed
their mastery of the sea, and ended by achieving a clear superiority
over them. Unity of plan and unity of command was also
on the side of the English. The inhabitants of the three sections
of the Danelagh were at best leagued in a many-headed confederacy.
Their opponents were led by kings whose orders
were punctually obeyed from Shrewsbury to Dover and from
London to Exeter. It must also be remembered that in the
greater part of the land which they possessed the Danes were
but a small minority of the population. After their first fury
was spent they no longer exterminated the conquered, but
had been content to make the Mercians and Deirans their
subjects, to take the best of the land, and exact tribute for the
rest. Only in Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and parts of Nottinghamshire
and Leicestershire do they seem to have settled thickly
