same kind of people who live now.
Mothers loved their children then, and fathers worked for them, just as
mothers and fathers do now, and children then were good or bad, as the
case might be, just as little children are now. And the people you read
about in history were real live people, who were good and bad, and glad
and sorry, just as people are now-a-days.

[Sidenote: A.D. 827.]

You know that if you were to set out on a journey from one end of
England to another, wherever you went, through fields and woods and
lanes, you would still be in the kingdom of Queen Victoria. But once
upon a time, hundreds of years ago, if a child had set out to ride, he
might have begun his ride in the morning in one kingdom, and finished it
in the evening in another, because England was not one great kingdom
then as it is now, but was divided up into seven pieces, with a king to
look after each, and these seven kings were always quarrelling with each
other and trying to take each other's kingdom away, just as you might
see seven naughty children, each with a plot of garden, trying to take
each other's gardens and spoiling each other's flowers in their wicked
quarrels. But presently came one King, named Egbert, who was stronger
than all the others; so he managed to put himself at the head of all the
kingdoms, and he was the first King of _all_ England. But though he had
got the other kings to give in to him, he did not have at all a peaceful
time. There were some very fierce wild pirates, called Danes, who used
to come sailing across the North Sea in ships with carved swans' heads
at the prow, and hundreds of fighting men aboard. Their own country was
bleak and desolate, and they were greedy and wanted the pleasant English
land. So they used to come and land in all sorts of places along the
sea-shore, and then they would march across the fields and kill the
peaceful farmers, and set fire to their houses, and take their sheep and
cows. Or sometimes they would drive them out, and live in the farmhouses
themselves. Of course, the English people were not going to stand this;
so they were always fighting to drive the Danes away when they came
here.

[Sidenote: A.D. 871.]

Egbert's son allowed the Danes to grow very strong in England, and when
he died he left several sons, like the kings in the fairy tales; and the
first of these princes was made King, but he could not beat the Danes,
and then the second one was made King, but he could no