We read of only three great names among the Saxons who impressed their genius on the nation, until the various Saxon kingdoms were united under the sovereignty of Ecgberht, or Egbert, king of Wessex, about the middle of the ninth century.  These were Theodore, Caedmon, and Baeda.  The first was a monk from Tarsus, whom the Pope dispatched in the year 668 to Britain as Archbishop of Canterbury.  To him the work of church organization was intrusted.  He enlarged the number of the sees, and arranged them on the basis which was maintained for a thousand years.  The subordination of priest to bishop and bishop to primate was more clearly defined by him.  He also assembled councils for general legislation, which perhaps led the way to national parliaments.  He not only organized the episcopate, but the parish system, and even the system of tithes has been by some attributed to him.  The missionary who had been merely the chaplain of a nobleman became the priest of the manor or parish.

The second memorable man was born a cowherd; encouraged to sing his songs by the abbess Hilda, a “Northumbrian Deborah.”  When advanced in life he entered through her patronage a convent, and sang the marvellous and touching stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, fixing their truths on the mind of the nation, and becoming the father of English poetry.

The third of these great men was the greatest, Baeda,—­or Bede, as the name is usually spelled.  He was a priest of the great abbey church of Weremouth, in Northumbria, and was a master of all the learning then known.  He was the life of the famous school of Jarrow, and it is said that six hundred monks, besides strangers, listened to his teachings.  His greatest work was an “Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,” which extends from the landing of Julius Caesar to the year 731.  He was the first English historian, and the founder of mediaeval history, and all we know of the one hundred and fifty years after the landing of Augustin the missionary is drawn from him.  He was not only historian, but theologian,—­the father of the education of the English nation.

It was one hundred and fourteen years after the death of the “venerable Bede” before Alfred was born, A.D. 849, the youngest son of Aethelwulf, king of Wessex, who united under his rule all the Saxon kingdoms.  The mother of Alfred was Osburgha, a German princess of extraordinary force of character.  From her he received, at the age of four, the first rudiments of education, and learned to sing those Saxon ballads which he afterwards recited with so much effect in the Danish camp.  At the age of five Alfred was sent to Rome, probably to be educated, where he remained two years, visiting on his return the court of Charles the Bald,—­the centre of culture in Western Europe.  The celebrated Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims,—­the greatest churchman of the age,—­was the most influential minister of the king; at whose table also sat John Erigena, then engaged in a controversy with Gotteschalk, the German monk, about the presence of Christ in the eucharist,—­the earliest notable theological controversy after the Patristic age.  Alfred was too young to take an interest in this profound discussion; but he may perhaps have received an intellectual impulse from his visit to Rome and Paris, which affected his whole subsequent life.