With the submission of Northumbria the work which Oswiu and AEthelbald had failed to do was done, and the whole English race was for the first time knit together under a single rule.  The union came not a moment too soon.  Had the old severance of people from people, the old civil strife within each separate realm, gone on it is hard to see how the attacks of the northmen could have been withstood.  They were already settled in Ireland; and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Charmouth in Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet them, from the field.  His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a little rest for the land; but AEthelwulf who mounted the throne on Ecgberht’s death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off by years of hard fighting.  AEthelwulf fought bravely in defence of his realm; in his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851 he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success won peace for the land through the short and uneventful reigns of his sons AEthelbald and AEthelberht.  But the northern storm burst in full force upon England when a third son, AEthelred, followed his brothers on the throne.  The northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland and the coast of Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and from west and east alike they closed upon Britain.  While one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom north of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on the coast of East-Anglia under Ivar the Boneless and marched the next year upon York.  A victory over two claimants of its crown gave the pirates Northumbrian and seizing the passage of the Trent they threatened an attack on the Mercian realm.  Mercia was saved by a march of King AEthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he made there with the northmen left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows.  His martyrdom by the heathen made Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his relics.  With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown.  Already the northmen had turned to the richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen.  Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their monks fled or lay slain among the ruins.  Mercia, though still free from actual attack, cowered panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment of tribute owned them as its overlords.

[Illustration:  England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3t.jpg)]

[Sidenote:  Wessex and the Northmen]