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 still centred in London seems to have been mainly carried on in
Frisian bottoms; for the Low Dutch of the continent still retained the
seafaring habits which those of England had forgotten. But a new enemy