became Harald “Fair-Hair.”  The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude fled out of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some swarming to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out again and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum’s host in the Rhine country or follow Hrolf to his fights on the Seine.  But little by little the land settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian realms gathered strength for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our after history.

[Sidenote:  England and its King]

But of the new danger which threatened it in this union of the north England knew little.  The storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of peace.  Here as elsewhere the northman had failed in his purpose of conquest; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty work.  In shattering the empire of Charles the Great he had given birth to the nations of modern Europe.  In his long strife with Englishmen he had created an English people.  The national union which had been brought about for a moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a union of sheer force which broke down at the first blow of the sea-robbers.  The black boats of the northmen were so many wedges that split up the fabric of the roughly-built realm.  But the very agency which destroyed the new England was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life that made its union real.  The peoples who had so long looked on each other as enemies found themselves fronted by a common foe.  They were thrown together by a common danger and the need of a common defence.  Their common faith grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in hand with England itself against the heathen of the north.  They recognized a common king as a common struggle changed AElfred and his sons from mere leaders of West-Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with the stranger.  And when the work which AElfred set his house to do was done, when the yoke of the northman was lifted from the last of his conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the battle for a common freedom and a common country, knew themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an English people.

The new people found its centre in the King.  The heightening of the royal power was a direct outcome of the war.  The dying out of other royal stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship.  But it was the war with the northmen that raised AElfred and his sons from tribal leaders into national kings.  The long series of triumphs which wrested the land from the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty; while the wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed the kings further and further from their people, lifted them higher and higher above the nobles, and clothed them more and more with a mysterious dignity.  Above all the