It was part of her kings’ policy to establish in every shire at least one town with a market-place and mint where contracts could be witnessed and reliable money coined. As a result, though a country of little account at the world’s edge, her wealth rapidly increased. Her system of taxation, of currency and coinage, of local government, of the issue of laws and charters were all in advance of those prevailing in the half-anarchical kingdoms and dukedoms of the former Frankish empire. It was this that helped to give England in the tenth century institutions stronger than those of any western land. The ideal of patriotism first began to take vague shape in men’s minds, superseding the older conception of tribal kinship. After that sacramental act loyalty to the Crown became a Christian obligation. Behind the solemn rites - the royal prostration and oath, the archbishop’s consecration and anointing, the anthem, “Zadoc the Priest,” linking the kings of the Angles and Saxons with those of the ancient Hebrews, the investiture with sword, sceptre and rod of justice, the shout of recognition by the assembled lords -lay the idea that an anointed king and his people were a partnership under God. It was at Edgar’s coronation that the earliest form of the service still used at the crowning of England’s kings was read by its author, the mystic saint and musician, Archbishop Dunstan.
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His uncle, Athelstan, was the patron of the Welsh prince, Hywel the Good, who attended meetings of the English Witan and gave Wales her first code of law.
True to Alfred’s policy of trust, he is said to have granted the king of the Scots and Picts the Lothian plain between Tweed and Forth in return for his allegiance. Once a year he sent a great fleet round it every winter he travelled its highways to hear causes and pronounce judgments. Edgar, who was called its Caesar, was rowed up the Dee at Chester in 973 by eight vassal kings, who between them did fealty for almost the entire island. Had their lives been longer all Britain might have become united under them. His descendants, the fair-haired athelings of the House of Wessex, produced in little more than half a century three other great rulers - Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, his grandson Athelstan, and his great-grandson Edgar. A great king had taught her people to defend their island home and had endowed it with a realm which was not for ever being partitioned among its princes. Other bands of Moslem fanatics, camped in the hills of northern Italy, raided the Alpine passes.Įngland was more fortunate. Two years before Athelstan’s victory at Brunanburgh they sacked Genoa. Meanwhile Saracen pirates, having driven the Byzantine fleets from the Mediterranean, harried Europe’s southern coasts. These plundering Magyars, or Hungarians as they were called, swept through East Francia or Germany and at one time reached Aquitaine and the Tuscan plain. At the end of the ninth century a nomad race of mounted archers from the Asian steppes overran the Pannonian plain between the Carpathians and Danube. Other heathens attacked a divided Christendom from the east. A few years after the great king had been laid in his grave at Winchester, one of their leaders, Rollo, secured from Charles the Simple - ruler of all that remained of Western Francia - a permanent settlement in the lower Seine basin which was called after them Normandy. Elsewhere the storm the English had stilled raged unabated the Vikings, driven from their prey on one side of the Channel, fell with equal fury on the other.
During the century that followed Alfred’s defeat of the Danes the process of rebuilding Christian society went on faster in England than in any other country.
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