THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOMS.


With the final triumph of Christianity, all the formative elements of
Anglo-Saxon Britain are complete. We see it, a rough conglomeration of
loosely-aggregated principalities, composed of a fighting aristocracy
and a body of unvalued serfs; while interspersed through its parts are
the bishops, monks, and clergy, centres of nascent civilisation for the
seething mass of noble barbarism. The country is divided into
agricultural colonies, and its only industry is agriculture, its only
wealth, land. We want but one more conspicuous change to make it into
the England of the Augustan Anglo-Saxon age–the reign of Eadgar–and
that one change is the consolidation of the discordant kingdoms under a
single loose over-lordship. To understand this final step, we must
glance briefly at the dull record of the political history.

Under Æthelfrith, Eadwine, and Oswiu, Northumbria had been the chief
power in England. But the eighth century is taken up with the greatness
of Mercia. Ecgfrith, the last great king of Northumbria, whose
over-lordship extended over the Picts of Galloway and the Cumbrians of
Strathclyde, endeavoured to carry his conquests beyond the Forth, and
annex the free land lying to the north of the old Roman line. He was
defeated and slain, and with him fell the supremacy of Northumbria.
Mercia, which already, under Penda and Wulfhere, had risen to the second
place, now assumed the first position among the Teutonic kingdoms.
Unfortunately we know little of the period of Mercian supremacy. The
West Saxon chronicle contains few notices of the rival state, and we are
thrown for information chiefly on the second-hand Latin historians of
the twelfth century. Æthelbald, the first powerful Mercian king