vasion of Wessex must not be passed over. The
common danger seems to have firmly welded together Welshman and Saxon
into a single nationality. The most faithful part of AElfred's dominions
were the West Welsh shires of Somerset and Devon, with the half Celtic
folk of Dorset and Wilts. The result is seen in the change which comes
over the relations between the two races. In Ine's laws the distinction
between Welshmen and Englishmen is strongly marked; the price of blood
for the servile population is far less than that of their lords: in
AElfred's laws the distinction has died out. Compared to the heathen
Dane, West Saxons and West Welsh were equally Englishmen. From that day
to this, the Celtic peasantry of the West Country have utterly forgotten
their Welsh kinship, save in wholly Cymric Cornwall alone. The Devon and
Somerset men have for centuries been as English in tongue and feeling as
the people of Kent or Sussex.

CHAPTER XV.

THE RECOVERY OF THE NORTH.

The history of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh
consists entirely of the continued contest between the West Saxons and
the Scandinavians. It falls naturally into three periods. The first is
that of the English reaction, when the West Saxon kings, Eadward and
AEthelstan, gradually reconquered the Danish North by inches at a time.
The second is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and Eadgar held
together the whole of Britain for a while in the hands of a single West
Saxon over-lord. The third is that of the decadence, when, under
AEthelred, the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish kings,
Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over all England, including even the
unconquered Wessex of AElfred himself.

At AElfred's death, his dominions comprised the larger Wessex, from Kent
to the Cornish border at Exeter, together with the portion of Mercia
south-west of Watling Street. The former kingdom passed into the hands
of his son Eadward; the latter was still held by the ealdorman AEthelred,
who had married AElfred's daughter AEthelflaed. The departure of the Danish
host, led by Haesten, left the English time to breathe and to recruit
their strength. Henceforth, for nearly a century, the direct wicking
incursions cease, and the war is confined to a long struggle with the
Northmen already settled in England. Four years later, the east Anglian
Danes broke the peace and harried Mercia and Wessex; but Eadward overran
their lands in return