England consolidated English under one Saxon king! The other kingdoms--
Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, and Essex--surviving as
shires and counties.

In 802 A.D., while Charlemagne was welding together his vast and
composite empire, the Saxon Egbert (Ecgberht), descendant of Cerdic
(the "Alder-mann"), was consolidating a less imposing, but, as it has
proved, more permanent kingdom; and the History of a United England had
begun.

While Christianity had been effaced by the Teuton invasion in England,
it had survived among the Irish-Britons. Ireland was never paganized.
With fiery zeal, her people not alone maintained the religion of the
Cross at home, but even drove back the heathen flood by sending
missionaries among the Picts in the Highlands, and into other outlying
territory about the North Sea.

Pope Gregory the Great saw this Keltic branch of Christendom, actually
outrunning Latin Christianity in activity, and he was spurred to an act
which was to be fraught with tremendous consequences.




CHAPTER II.


[Sidenote: Augustine Came, 597.]

The same spot in Kent (the isle of Thanet), which had witnessed the