About 60 years later (577) the great victory of Deorham, won by Ceawlin, the grandson of Cerdic, once more carried forward the invading flood and finally separated the Britons of Wales from their kinsmen in the district which was then called West Wales, but which we now know as Cornwall.
The Saxon conquest was apparently never an easy one, and became harder and slower as time went on. By the middle of the 6th cen tury, roughly speaking, the invaders occupied all of England that hes east of a line drawn from Berwick to Portland; but it had taken at least three generations to reach so far. Then came the above-mentioned victory of Deorham and the extension of the Saxon border far into Devonshire. In the northwest 'luring the 7th and 8th centuries, the Northumbrian kings cut short the British kingdom of Strathclyde, and perhaps reduced it into a condition of some thing like vassalage. On the Welsh marches, Offa, the great king of Mercia, in the 8th cen tury, carried the western border of from the Severn to the Wye, and by a substan tial earthwork, some vestiges of which still re main and are known as Offa's Dyke, fixed the dividing line between England and Wales al most in its present position. The actual con quest of .Wales and its complete subjection to the English kings had to wait till the 13th century, when it was accomplished by Edward I.
The four centuries which intervened be tween the departure of the legions and the ac cession of Egbert are generally felt by the his torical student as a wearisome interlude in which nothing is done toward the real business of the drama, the creation of an united Eng land. In truth, no thought that such was the real action of the play probably visited the minds of the chief performers. The invaders belonged to various clans, tribes and communi ties and though they must have spoken the same or nearly the same language, they had only the feeblest conception of duty toward one common country. Even within the limits of the same race we look in vain for any active principle of brotherhood. Angle seems to war against Angle, and Saxon against Saxon, just as cheer fully as either would war against the other. It is true that the moral conquest which lies out side the scope of this paper, the conversion of the English to Christianity (600-686), did some thing toward quickening the sense of national unity; but notwithstanding the Church's influ ence, this was still weak when Egbert ascended the West Saxon throne, nor can he, standing the ascendency which he exercised over the other still subsisting kingdoms, be re garded as truly king over all England. It was the terrible Danish invasions and the fact that only one champion, the hero king of was found able to resist them, which finally established the unity of Anglo-Saxon Britain under the rule of Alfred and his descendants.
We call the new invaders, for convenience sake, Danes, but in truth they came not only Denmark, but from Norway, perhaps from all the harbors of the Scandinavian seas. In 789 the Danish storm began to blow, and with one or two lulls, it blew for three centuries, till Harold Hardrada lay dead on the field of Stam ford Bridge. In the year just mentioned (789) three Danish ships appeared off the coast of Devonshire. The mariners resisted the attempt of the king's steward to levy toll upon them, slew him, and sailed away. Four years after ward came .another and more deadly invasion. "The heathen men," says the Chronicle, °miser ably destroyed God's Church at Lindisfarne, with rapine and slaughter?' This ravage of one of the holiest places in Western Christendom showed the savage heathenism of the invaders and struck terror into the hearts of noble and peasant alike, who saw that no sanctuary could be of any avail when the terrible raven standard of the Danes was flapping in their harbors.
The usual course of one of the early Danish invasions was something like this. When spring days dawned a little fleet of ships, or rather long boats, undecked, with one mast in each, and seats for 60 rowers, would push off from the Danish or Norwegian coast and appear in English or French waters. (It must be remem bered that France and Germany suffered almost as severely as England from the Danish rava ges). The mariners steered their barks into some estuary, such as that which then severed Thanet from the mainland, and leaving them there under a sufficient guard, spread them selves over the country in quest of horses. When they had thus mounted themselves at the expense of the victim country, they made rapid excursions far and wide over the land, burning towns, plundering monasteries and churches, fighting with and generally defeating the eat dorman or lord-lieutenant of a county, who at the head of his rustic militia (fyrd) came forth to fight his brave but stupid battle of defense. Their enemies accuse them of inhuman crimes: the torture of prisoners, the violation of women, the mirthful slaughter of little chil dren; but there is some doubt how far these atrocities can be fairly taken as typical of the general character of the Danish invasions. Of one feature of these invasions there can be no doubt: that is, of the special hostility which they displayed to the churches and monasteries of Western Europe. The historical literature of our country has probably to lament the loss of priceless manuscripts, especially in the con vents of Northumbria and Mercia, caused by the ravages Hof the Danes.