a wider sphere than
the waters of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth garnered in the
abbeys and towns of the new Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the coasts of Northern Gaul;
and just before Offa's death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
To men of that day it must have seemed as though the world had gone back
three hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth their
pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or Cerdic. There was the same
wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck inland along the
river-reaches or moored round the river isles, 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 themselves had attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion,
government disappeared before these northmen as before the northmen of
three centuries before.

[Sidenote: Ecgberht]

In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
and the presence of the freebooters soon told on the political balance of
the English realms. A great revolution was going on in the south, where
Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death, while
the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht.
In Offa's days Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex
and had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He
remained there through the memorable year during which Charles the Great
restored the Empire of the West, and returned in 802 to be quietly
welcomed as King by the West-Saxon people. A march into the heart of
Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in
the south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia, which broke out
in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of
Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all England south of
Thames to the West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of
East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great
overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength when Ecgberht
crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without
a struggle to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of
supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream of a union