off from the East-Saxon kingdom. Among the shiftings of the smaller English kingdoms, London seems to have held her own as a distinct power, sometimes acknowledging the supremacy of Mercia, sometimes the supremacy of Wessex, but always keeping somewhat of an independent being. She parts off from the main East-Saxon body; she carries off a fragment of it along with her, to become what we may call a free Imperial city, bearing rule, like Bern or Venice, over her pioukou, her Unterthanen, the still subject district of the MiddleSaxons.1 London therefore soon falls out of our special survey of the EastSaxon land. But the East-Saxon land can number within its borders not a few historic sites besides the towns which Boadicea overthrew. There is the battlefield of Maldon and the battle-field of Assandún; there is the wooden church of Greenstead where Saint Eadmund rested; there is Earl Harold's Waltham and King Eadward's Havering; there is Barking, where the Conqueror waited while his first tower was rising over London, where Eadwine and Morkere and perhaps Waltheof himself became the men of the stranger, and where Englishmen first bought back their lands at a price as a grant from the foreign King. The East-Saxon land has thus its full share among the great events of our early history; but the history of the kingdom itself, as a kingdom, fills no great place in our annals. Essex supplied no Bretwalda to bring the signs of Imperial dignity to London or Colchester as Eadwine brought them to York. After some flittings to and fro, Essex passed, like the other English kingdoms, under the supremacy of Ecgberht, and by the division between Ælfred and Guthrum, it passed under the rule of the Dane. It is in the great struggle of the next reign. that Essex, and especially its two great

1 Middlesex must be looked on as a district subject to the city of London so long as it neither chooses its own sheriffs nor receives them from the central power of the kingdom, but has to take such sheriffs as the city of London thinks good to give it.

historic sites of Colchester and Maldon, stand forth for a moment as the centre of English history, as the scene of some of the most gallant exploits in our early annals, exploits which seem to have had a lasting effect on the destinies of the English kingdom.

It was in the year 913, the thirteenth year of Eadward's reign, the year after he had taken possession of London and Oxford, that we hear for the first time of a solitary East-Saxon expedition. Eadward marched to Maldon ; he stayed there till he had built a fortress at Witham, and had received the submission of many who had been under Danish rule. This sounds like the emancipation of all Essex south of the Panta or Blackwater. Our next notice is nine years later, after Eadward and his sister, the Lady of the Mercians, had won back most of the central part of the island to English and Christian rule. We now again find Eadward carrying his sphere of operations into the East-Saxon land. He first fortified Maldon, the goal of his former march, the borough which seventythree years later was to behold the valour and the death of Brihtnoth. But Colchester was still left in the

hands of the enemy. The next year the Danes again broke the peace; and, during the whole former part of the year, fighting went on in central England between the Danes and the defenders of the various towns which King Eadward had already fortified. At Towcester, at Bedford, and elsewhere, the English defenders drove off the Danish invaders from King Eadward's new fortresses. Towcester was not yet surrounded by the stone wall which girded it before the year was out; but the valour of its defenders, fighting, we may suppose, behind a palisade or rampart of earth, was enough to bear up till help came and the enemy was driven away. During all this stage of the campaign, the warfare seems to be purely local. The Danes attack, the English defend; there is no mention of the King or of any royal army. Presently the tables

are turned; the local force of various English districts begins to attack posts which the Danes still held among them. And now comes our first distinct mention of warfare on East-Saxon soil. Colchester is still held by the enemy, Maldon is held by King Eadward's garrison. The tale cannot be so well told as in the language of the chronicle :-"There gathered mickle-folk on harvest, either of Kent and of Surrey and of EastSaxons, and of each of the nighest boroughs, and fared to Colchester, and beset the borough all round1 and there fought till they had won it and the folk all slew, and took all that there within was, but the men that there fled over the wall." Colchester was thus again an English borough, won, as it would seem, by the force of a popular movement among the men of Essex and the neighbouring shires, without any help from the West-Saxon king. Then, in the same harvest, the Danes of East Anglia, strengthened by wikings from beyond sea, set forth to attack the English garrison in Maldon. In the words of the Chronicler, "they beset the borough all round, and fought there till to the borough-folk there came more force from without to help them, and the host forsook the borough, and fared away from it; and then fared the men after out of the borough, and eke they that had come to them for out to help, and put the host to flight, and slew of them many hundred either the ashmen 2 and others." Thus, of the two great points in the East-Saxon land, Colchester was won, Maldon was kept, and that without any help from the king. Local energy had done so much that, when shortly the unconquered king came with his West-Saxon army, his march was little more than a triumphal progress. He came to Towcester; he girded the town with its stone wall, and received the

1 Such I take to be the force of "ymbsæton which is said both of Colchester and of Maldon, as distinguished from "besæton" which is said of Temsford.

2 The men of the ships, the wikings.

submission of Northamptonshire. He marched to Huntingdon; he strengthened the fortress, and received the submission of the surrounding country. Then comes the fact which immediately concerns us here. That "ilk year afore Martinmas fared

Eadward king with West-Saxons' fyrd to Colneceaster, and repaired the borough and made it new there where it tobroken was." Here then we have a distinct record of damage done and of damage repaired in the circuit of the walls of Colchester. Part of the wall was broken down in the siege, and the breach was repaired on the King's coming. It would be pleasant if we could tell, amongst the many bricks of various dates which are to be seen in the walls of Colchester, those bricks which were set in their place at the bidding of the founder of the English kingdom, and not by any earlier or later hand. If we can find the site of the breach which Englishmen made in winning Colchester from the Dane, Englishmen may look on that spot in the Roman wall with the same eyes with which all Europe looks on that spot in the wall of Aurelian where the newest bricks of all tell us where the army of united Italy entered her capital.

But the two great East-Saxon sieges of this memorable year have more than a local interest. They were the last warfare of the reign of the Unconquered King. After Colchester was won and Maldon saved, no sword was drawn against Eadward and his dominion. The rest of his reign is one record of submissions on the part of his enemies. At Colchester itself the men of EastAnglia and Essex, who had been under Danish rule, first bow to him; then comes the submission of the Danish host itself; then that of all Mercia; then that of all North Wales. The realm of the West-Saxon king now reaches to the Humber. Northumberland, Strathclyde, Scotland, have as yet been untouched by his arms or his policy But next comes the great day of all,

the crowning-point of West-Saxon triumph, when the King of Scots and all the people of Scots, and Rægnold and Eadwulf's son, and all that were in Northumberland, Angles, Danes, Northmen, or any other, and eke the King of Strathclyde Welsh, and all the Strathclyde Welsh, bowed to Eadward at Bakewell, and sought him to father and lord. The fights on East-Saxon ground, the storm of Colchester, the defence of Maldon, had taught the whole world of Britain that Eadward and his people were not to be withstood. The gallant gathering of the men of Essex, Kent, and Surrey had led to the establishment of an English kingdom bounded only by the Humber, of an English Empire bounded only by the Northern sea.

Thus two East-Saxon sites, one of them our present place of meeting, have won for themselves a foremost place in that struggle with the Dane which welded England into a single kingdom. And one of those sites joins again with a third whose name we have not yet heard to form another pair no less memorable in the struggle which gave the united kingdom of England into the hands of a Danish king. If the days of Colchester and Maldon stand forth among the brightest days of English victory, so Maldon and Assandún stand out among the saddest yet noblest days of English overthrow. Our last East-Saxon memory showed us the invading Dane flying from before the walls of Maldon ; our next East-Saxon memory shows us the Dane victorious in the hard handplay, and the Ealdorman of the land dying in defence of the Saxon shore. The fight by the Panta, the fight where Brihtnoth fell, lives in that glorious battle-song which, were it in any tongue but the native speech of Englishmen, would have won its place alongside of the battle-songs of ancient Hellas.

The

song is plainly local and contemporary; it comes straight from the soul of the East-Saxon gleeman of the tenth century. It is something to stand on the spot and to call up the picture of the valiant Ealdorman, lighting from his horse among

his faithful hearth-band, marshalling his men in the thick array of the shieldwall, refusing to pay tribute to the wikings, and telling them that point and edge shall judge between them. Then we see the dauntless three who kept the bridge, Wulfstan, Ælfhere, and Maccus-Wulfstan the Horatius, his comrades the Lartius and Herminius, of the fight in which the legend of the Tiber was repeated in sober truth by East-Saxon Panta. Yet among the crowds to whom the legends of distant lands are as household words, how few have ever heard the names of the true heroes of our own soil. Then Brihtnoth, in his "overmood," in his excess of daring and lofty spirit, allows the enemy to pass the water: then comes the fight itself, the Homeric exploits on either side; the death-wound of Brihtnoth and his last prayer; the dastardly flight of Godric on the horse of his fallen lord, the fight over the body of the slain chief; the self-devotion of the true companions who in death are not divided, as they lie "thegn-like" around their lord, their Earl and ring giver. No tale is told with more spirit, no tale sets better before us that great feature of old Teutonic, and indeed of old Aryan, life, the personal and sacred tie which bound a man to the lord of his own seeking. But the men who fought on that day were Englishmen; the tongue in which their deeds were sung was English; their deeds are therefore forgotten, and the song which tells of them sounds in the ears of their children like the stammering speech of an unknown tongue.

But if the banks of Panta saw the glorious death of the local East-Saxon chief, the banks of another East-Saxon estuary saw, not indeed the death but the last struggle, of the champion, not only of Essex, but of all England. The fight of Maldon is handed down to us in the glowing strains of native song; the song which told of the fight of Assandún has perished: we have only feeble echoes preserved to us in the Latin pages of the historian who has kept so many such precious fragments

from the song of Anderida to the song of Stamford bridge. As to the site of Assandún I will not enter on any discussion; I think no one will doubt about it who has been there. There is the hill on which Eadmund Ironside marshalled his army for the last battle, the hill down whose slope he rushed with his sword, as the faint echo of the ballad tells us, like the lightning-flash, leaving in his charge the royal post between the Standard and the WestSaxon Dragon, and fighting hand to hand in the foremost rank of his warriors. We hear from the other side how the Raven of Denmark had already fluttered its wings for victory; but it was only through Eadric's treasontreason which no effort of ingenious advocacy can wipe out from the pages which record it—that Eadmund, in the sixth battle of that great year, found himself for the first time defeated. The spot which saw Cnut's victory over all England saw also a few years later his offering in his new character of an English King. Then arose the joint work of Cnut and Thurkill, the minster of stone and lime, whose material was as much to be noted in the timber land of Essex as the material of the wooden basilica of Glastonbury was to be noted among the rich stone-quarries of Somerset. Of that minster the first priest was Stigand, the man who won his first lowly promotion at the hands of the Dane, and who lived to be hurled from the metropolitan throne at the bidding of the Norman.

But the East-Saxon land contains a memorial of those times more precious even than the memories of Maldon and Assandún, a memorial too which forms a special tie between Eastern and Western England. It was on East-Saxon soil, just within the East-Saxon border, on the spot to which the willing oxen drew the Holy Cross of Lutgaresbury from the place of its first finding in the West, that Tofig first cleared the wild forest, that he first reared the minster of Waltham in its earlier and lowlier form, and gathered round it a band of No. 212.

-VOL. XXXVI.

pilgrims and devotees who changed the wilderness into a dwelling place of man. It was on that spot that Earl Harold, patron of the secular clergy in the most monastic period of our history, patron of learning in a day when the light of English literature seemed almost to have died away, enlarged the church and the foundation of Tofig. It was for the good of this spot that he sought in lands beyond the sea, in the kindred land with which England had exchanged so many worthies the land to which she had given Ealhwine, and whence she had received Old-Saxon John-for men to help him in the work which he had planned for the weal of Waltham and of England. It was there that the doomed King, marching forth to the great strife for his land and people, went to make his last prayers and to offer his last gifts, and it was there that, as men of his own day believed, he received that awful warning which led his faithful bedesmen to his last field, standing afar that they might see the end. It was there, in his own minster, that his bones, translated from their earlier South-Saxon restingplace, lay as the most precious among his gifts to the house which he had founded. And it was there, when his foundation had been changed to another form, when a choir in a new style of art had risen over his tomb, that the greatest of his successors, the first of a new line of English kings, lay for a moment by his side. The choir of Waltham has perished along with the choir of Battle; the place of Harold's tomb, like the place of Harold's standard, again lies open to the day; but if the East-Saxon land had nothing to boast of beside the unmarked spot where Harold and Edward met in death, that alone would place the shire where Waltham stands among the most historic shires of England.

Among his other possessions in all parts of England, Earl Harold held four houses in Colchester. This fact, I need not say, comes from the Domesday Survey, which tells us how those houses had passed away to the abbey of

K

Westminster. The Domesday of Essex is very full, Essex being one of the three eastern shires of which we have only the first and fuller account, while in most of the other shires we have only the shorter form which is found in the first volume of the Exchequer Domesday.1 Essex was one of those shires which came into the possession of the Conqueror, not indeed, like Sussex and Kent, immediately after the great battle, but immediately after the submission at Berkhampstead. Like Kent and Sussex, its men had been in their place in the battle, and it became subject to a confiscation only less sweeping than that of Kent and Sussex. We do not find in Essex, as we do in many other shires, either one or two English landowners still keeping great estates, or a whole crowd of them keeping smaller estates. A few entries of English names towards the end of the record are all. We hear of no revolts in Essex after the coronation of William; the strength of the shire, like the strength of Kent and Sussex, must have been cut off on Senlac, and no foreign prince offered himself as deliverer to the men of Essex as Eustace of Boulogne offered himself to the men of Kent. Still there must have been some confiscations in Essex later than the time of the redemption of lands for the penalty had fallen on one of the very commissioners by whom the redemption was carried out. Engelric, who must have played much the same part in Essex which Thurkill played in Warwickshire and Wiggod in Berkshire, as the Englishman who, by whatever means, rose high in William's favour, had fallen from his high estate before the Survey was made. Another man, English by birth though not by descent, Swegen the son of

1 The discovery of the Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis, lately published by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, gives us another shire of which we have both the fuller and the abridged account.

See History of the Norman Conquest, vol. iv., p. 26., 725.

Robert, who took the name of the shire as a surname, he whose father had stood by the death-bed of Eadward and had counselled William on his landing to get him back to his own duchy, still kept great estates; but he had lost his office of Sheriff. Most of the familiar names of the Conquest appear in Essex as well as elsewhere; but the East-Saxon shire enjoys a singular privilege in not having had an acre of its soil handed over to the Conqueror's rapacious brother, Count Robert of Mortain. But Bishop Odo is there and Count Alan, and the Count of Eu, and William of Warren and Hugh of Montfort, and many another name of those who found their reward in almost every shire of England. Among the names specially connected with the district stand out Geoffrey of Mandeville, father of a line of East-Saxon Earls, Ralph Baynard whose name lives in London city, and the names specially belonging to Colchester, Hamo and Eudo. Of Colchester itself the record in the Survey is one of the fullest among the boroughs of England. It ought to be fully illustrated by some one who to minute local knowledge adds the power of comparing what the Survey tells us about Essex and Colchester with what it tells us about other shires and boroughs. A general historian from a distance cannot do this; a dull local antiquary cannot do it; it needs a man on the spot who knows the ins and outs of the land, but who also understands historical criticism, and who knows something of other parts of England as well as of his

own.

The Survey gives us no such precious notices of the municipal constitution of Colchester as it gives us of the municipal constitution of Lincoln, Cambridge, and Stamford. Colchester had been held by the Danes; but they had been driven out too soon and too thoroughly to allow of the formation of a patriciate of Danish lawmen. But we see the burgesses of Colchester already forming a recognized body, holding common lands,