eady for them on whatso day they willed; and that he
would be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, for
the behoof of the host." Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out
of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains.

This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarily
tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highly
important and interesting facts. It is impossible not to be struck with
the extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invaders
overran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states. We
cannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmness
of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by AElfred in Wessex.
The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of native
Northumbrian and Mercian accounts. We might, perhaps, find, had we
fuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fight
for their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead
us to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness of
our authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathen
kingdom was established in the pure English land of Baeda and Cuthberht,
while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own for
ever in peninsular and half-Celtic Wessex.

The difference is doubtless due in part to merely surface causes. East
Anglia had long lost her autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia,
was sometimes broken up under several ealdormen. For her and for
Northumbria the conquest was but a change from a West Saxon to a Danish
master. The house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and tribal
organisation, and was incapable of substituting a central organisation
in its place. With no roads and no communications such a centralising
scheme is really impracticable. The disintegrated English kingdoms made
little show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord. They could accept a
Dane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon.

But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper and more
fundamental cause underlying the difference. The Scandinavians were
nearer to the pure English in blood and speech than they were to the
Saxons. In their old home the two races had lived close together,--in
Sleswick, Jutland, and Scania,--while the Saxons had dwelt further
south, near the Frankish border, by the lowlands of the Elbe