wned
in song; his great-grandson, Edgar, in one of his charters thanks the
grace of God which had permitted him to extend his rule further than
his predecessors, over the islands and seas as far as Norway, and over
a great part of Ireland. We are not to look on it as a mere piece of
vanity, when he seeks after new titles for his power, when he calls
himself Basileus and Imperator; the former is the title of the
Eastern, the latter of the Western emperors; he will not yield the
precedence to either the one or the other, though the latter are so
closely related to him by blood. We cannot express the feeling of a
supreme power, independent of men, derived from the grace of God, the
King of kings, more strongly than it was expressed by Edgar under
Dunstan's influence; the ruling motives of life in Church and State
make it conceivable that a monkish hierarch, such as Dunstan, shared,
as it were, the King's power, and shaped the course of the authority
of the state.

It was still the ancestral Anglo-Saxon crown which glittered on
Edgar's head, but, if we may so say, its splendour had at the same
time received a monkish and hierarchic colouring.

NOTES:

[2] The words of some MSS. in Caesar's Commentaries, iv. 25,
'deserite, milites, si vultis, aquilam, atque hostibus prodite,' might
well be taken for the genuine words, originally noted down in his
Ephemerides (journal).

[3] Brettanian mentoi hoi Romaioi anasosasthai ouketi eschon, all'
ousa hupo tyrannois ap' autou emene. Procop. de bello Vand. I. No. 2.
p. 318 ed. Bonn. Compare Zosimus, vi. 4. on, we may assume, the better
authority of Olympiodorus.

[4] The simplest form of the Saga occurs in Gildas, with very few
historical ingredients. Nennius enlarges it with Anglo-Saxon
traditions. Beda has combined both with some notices from the real
history. Since the departure of the Romans was rightly fixed about
409, and Gildas said the Britons had rest for forty years, Beda
settled that the Saxons arrived in 449.

[5] Beda, Hist. Eccl. ii. 2. Some have wished to consider the remark,
that Augustine had been then long dead, as a later interpretation, 'ad
tollendam labem caedis Bangorensis;' this, however, is against the
spirit of that age.

[6] 'Omnem orbem, quocunque ecclesia Christi diffusa est per diversas
nationes et linguas uno temporis ordine.' Beda, Hist. Eccl. iii. 14.

CHAPTER II.

TRANSFER OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CROWN TO THE NORMANS AND PLANTAGENETS.