incorporated Northumbria with his dominions than dread of Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelaw.  The Scot King Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the northmen.  The league was broken by AEthelstan’s rapid action in 926; the North-Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies, and to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared till then with its English inhabitants, But eight years later the same league called AEthelstan again to the North; and though Constantine was punished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness the English army had no sooner withdrawn than Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber.  Scot and Cumbrian fought beside the northmen against the West-Saxon King; but his victory at Brunanburh crushed the confederacy and won peace till his death.  His brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession in 940, and the North again rose in revolt.  The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again laid the Danelaw at his feet.

[Sidenote:  Dunstan]

But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword.  The completion of the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a priest.  Dunstan stands first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey and ended in Laud.  He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid personality after eight centuries of revolution and change.  He was born in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a man of wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester.  It must have been in his father’s hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for “the vain songs of heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts,” which afterwards roused against him the charge of sorcery.  Thence too he might have derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit.  Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane letters till his brain broke down in delirium.  So famous became his knowledge in the neighbourhood that news of it reached the court of AEthelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers.  Again they drove him from Eadmund’s train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire.  The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk.