"and
Ecgberht gained the day, and there was muckle slaughter." Therefore all
the Saxon name, held tributary by the Mercians, gathered about the Saxon
champion. "The Kentish folk, and they of Surrey, and the South Saxons,
and the East Saxons turned to him." In the same year, the East Anglians,
anxious to avoid the power of Mercia, "sought Ecgberht for peace and for
aid." Beornwulf, the Mercian king, marched against his revolted
tributaries: but the East Anglians fought him stoutly, and slew him and
his successor in two battles. Ecgberht followed up this step by annexing
Mercia in 829: after which he marched northward against the
Northumbrians, who at once "offered him obedience and peace; and they
thereupon parted." One year later, Ecgberht led an army against the
northern Welsh, and "reduced them to humble obedience." Thus the West
Saxon kingdom absorbed all the others, at least so far as a loose
over-lordship was concerned. Ecgberht had rivalled his master Karl by
founding, after a fashion, the empire of the English. But all the local
jealousies smouldered on as fiercely as ever, the under-kings retained
their several dominions, and Ecgberht's supremacy was merely one of
superior force, unconnected with any real organic unity of the kingdom
as a whole. Ecgberht himself generally bore the title of King of the
West Saxons, like his ancestors: and though in dealing with his Anglian
subjects he styled himself Rex Anglorum, that title perhaps means little
more than the humbler one of Rex Gewissorum, which he used in addressing
his people of the lesser principality. The real kingdom of the English
never existed before the days of Eadward the Elder, and scarcely before
the days of William the Norman and Henry the Angevin. As to the kingdom
of England, that was a far later invention of the feudal lawyers.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES.

In the long period of three and a-half centuries which had elapsed
between the Jutish conquest of Kent and the establishment of the West
Saxon over-lordship, the politics of Britain had been wholly insular.
The island had been brought back by Augustine and his successors into
ecclesiastical, commercial, and literary union with the continent: but
no foreign war or invasion had ever broken the monotony of murdering the
Welsh and harrying the surrounding English. The isolation of England was
complete. Ship-building was almost an obsolete art: and the small trade
which sti