d 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 h