England, he met with an
opposition which he little looked for.

His eldest son, Athelstan, being dead, Ethelbald, his second, who had
assumed the government, formed, in concert with many of the nobles, the
project of excluding his father from a throne which his weakness and
superstition seem to have rendered him so ill qualified to fill. The
people were divided between the two princes, and a bloody civil war,
joined to all the other calamities under which the English labored,
appeared inevitable, when Ethelwolf had the facility to yield to the
greater part of his son's pretensions. He made with him a partition of
the kingdom; and, taking to himself the eastern part, which was always,
at that time, esteemed the least considerable, as well as the most
exposed,[****] he delivered over to Ethelbald the sovereignty of the
western. Immediately after, he summoned the states of the whole kingdom,
and with the same facility conferred a perpetual and important donation
on the church.

[* Asser. p. 2. Chron. Sax. 76. H. Hunting, lib.
v.]

[** A mancus was about the weight of our present
half crown. See Spelman's Glossary, in verbo Mancus.]

[*** W. Malms, lib. ii. cap. 2.]

[**** Asser. p. 3. W. Malms, lib. ii. cap. 2. M.
West. p. 7, 8.]

The ecclesiastics, in those days of ignorance, made rapid advances in
the acquisition of power and grandeur; and, inculcating the most absurd
and most interested doctrines, though they sometimes met, from the
contrary interests of the laity, with an opposition which it required
time and address to overcome, they found no obstacle in their reason or
understanding. Not content with the donations of land made them by the
Saxon princes and nobles, and with temporary oblations from the devotion
of the people, they had cast a wishful eye on a vast revenue, which they
claimed as belonging to them by a sacred and indefeasible title. However
little versed in the Scriptures, they had been able to discover that,
under the Jewish law, a tenth of all the produce of land was conferred
on the priesthood; and, forgetting what they themselves taught, that the
moral part only of that law was obligatory on Christians, they insisted
that this donation conveyed a perpetual property, inherent by divine
right in those who officiated at the altar. During some centuries, the
whole scope of sermons and homilies was directed to this purpose; and
one would have imagined, from th