e,
and forsook every kind of heathendom." In the West, he drove the Welsh
from Exeter, which they had till then occupied in common with the
English, and fixed their boundary at the Tamar. But once more the
pretended vassals rebelled. Constantine, king of Scots, threw off his
allegiance, and AEthelstan thereupon "went into Scotland, both with a
land host and a ship host, and harried a mickle deal of it." In 937, the
feudatories made a final and united effort to throw off the West Saxon
yoke. The Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the people of Wales and
Cornwall, the lords of Bamborough, and the Danes throughout the North
and East, all rose together in a great league against their over-lord.
Anlaf, king of the Dublin Danes, came over from Ireland to aid them,
with a large body of wickings. The confederates met the West Saxon
_fyrd_ or levy at an unknown spot named Brunanburh, where AEthelstan
overthrew them in a crushing defeat, which forms the subject of a fine
war-song, inserted in full in the English Chronicle.[1] Three years
later AEthelstan died, as his father had died before him, undisputed
over-lord of all Britain, and immediate king of the whole Teutonic
portion.

[1] See chapter xx.

Yet once more the feeble unity of the country broke hopelessly asunder.
Eadmund, who succeeded his brother, found the Danes of the North and the
Midlands again insubordinate. The year after his accession "the
Northumbrians belied their oath, and chose Anlaf of Ireland for king."
The Five Burgs went too, and the old boundary of Watling Street was once
more made the frontier of the Danish possessions. In 944, however,
Eadmund subdued all Northumbria, and expelled its Danish kings. His
recovery of the Five Burgs, and the joy of the Christian English
inhabitants, are vividly set forth in a fragmentary ballad embedded in
the Chronicle. The next year he harried Strathclyde or Cumberland, the
Welsh kingdom between Clyde and Morecambe, and handed it over to
Malcolm, king of Scots, as a pledge of his fidelity. At Eadmund's death
in 946--when he was stabbed in his royal hall by an outlaw--his kingdom
fell to his brother Eadred. Two years later Northumbria again revolted,
and chose Eric for its king. Eadred harried and burnt the province,
which he then handed over to an earl of his own creation, one of the
Bamborough family. The king himself died in 955, and was succeeded by
his nephew Eadwig. But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, and