between Welshmen and Englishmen is strongly marked; the price of blood
for the servile population is far less than that of their lords: in
Ælfred's laws the distinction has died out. Compared to the heathen
Dane, West Saxons and West Welsh were equally Englishmen. From that day
to this, the Celtic peasantry of the West Country have utterly forgotten
their Welsh kinship, save in wholly Cymric Cornwall alone. The Devon and
Somerset men have for centuries been as English in tongue and feeling as
the people of Kent or Sussex.




CHAPTER XV.

THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH.


The history of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh
consists entirely of the continued contest between the West Saxons and
the Scandinavians. It falls naturally into three periods. The first is
that of the English reaction, when the West Saxon kings, Eadward and
Æthelstan, gradually reconquered the Danish North by inches at a time.
The second is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and Eadgar held
together the whole of Britain for a while in the hands of a single West
Saxon over-lord. The third is that of the decadence, when, under
Æthelred, the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish kings,
Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over all England, including even the
unconquered Wessex of Ælfred himself.

At Ælfred's death, his dominions comprised the larger Wessex, from Kent