themselves. His rise depended much more on the fact that the
old families in Mercia, Northumbria, and Kent had disappeared, and the
succession in general had become doubtful; after Egbert had conquered
the claimants to the throne in a great and bloody battle, he was
recognised by the Witans of the several kingdoms as their common
prince, and his family as that which in fact it now was,--the leading
one of all. After the example of Pipin's family, whose alliance with
the Papacy was the most important historical event of the epoch and
founded Western Christendom, the descendants of Cerdic also got
themselves anointed by the popes--for the religious movement still had
the predominance over every other. The amalgamation of the tribes and
kingdoms found its expression in the Church, through the prestige and
rank of the Archbishop of Canterbury, almost earlier than it did in
the State; the unity of the Church broke down the antipathies of the
tribes, and prepared the way for that of the kingdoms. In the midst of
this work of construction, so incomplete as yet, but so full of hope,
of these birthpangs of a new life, the very existence of the country
was threatened by the rise of a new Great Power. For so may we well
designate the influence which the Scandinavian North exercised by land
over Eastern Europe, and at the same time over all the Western coasts
by sea.

Only a part of the German peoples had been influenced by the idea of
the Empire or the Church; the inborn heathenism of the rest, irritated
by the losses it had sustained and the dangers that continually
threatened it, roused itself for the most formidable onslaught that
the civilised world has ever had to withstand from the heroic and
barbarous children of Nature.

The mischief they wrought in Britain, from the middle of the ninth
century onwards, is indescribable.

The Scoto-Irish schools, then in their most flourishing state (they
trained John Scotus Erigena, of all the scholars of that time the man
who had the widest intellectual range), fell before the Danish, not
the Anglo-Saxon assaults; an element of intellectual activity which
might have been of the greatest importance was thus lost to the
Western world. But the Northmen persecuted the Romano-English forms as
bitterly as they did the Irish. In the places where those Anglo-Saxon
scholars had been trained, who then enlightened the West, the Northmen
planted the banner which announced utter destruction; with