his allegiance, and AEthelstan thereupon “went into Scotland, both with a land host and a ship host, and harried a mickle deal of it.”  In 937, the feudatories made a final and united effort to throw off the West Saxon yoke.  The Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the people of Wales and Cornwall, the lords of Bamborough, and the Danes throughout the North and East, all rose together in a great league against their over-lord.  Anlaf, king of the Dublin Danes, came over from Ireland to aid them, with a large body of wickings.  The confederates met the West Saxon fyrd or levy at an unknown spot named Brunanburh, where AEthelstan overthrew them in a crushing defeat, which forms the subject of a fine war-song, inserted in full in the English Chronicle.[1] Three years later AEthelstan died, as his father had died before him, undisputed over-lord of all Britain, and immediate king of the whole Teutonic portion.

 [1] See chapter xx.

Yet once more the feeble unity of the country broke hopelessly asunder.  Eadmund, who succeeded his brother, found the Danes of the North and the Midlands again insubordinate.  The year after his accession “the Northumbrians belied their oath, and chose Anlaf of Ireland for king.”  The Five Burgs went too, and the old boundary of Watling Street was once more made the frontier of the Danish possessions.  In 944, however, Eadmund subdued all Northumbria, and expelled its Danish kings.  His recovery of the Five Burgs, and the joy of the Christian English inhabitants, are vividly set forth in a fragmentary ballad embedded in the Chronicle.  The next year he harried Strathclyde or Cumberland, the Welsh kingdom between Clyde and Morecambe, and handed it over to Malcolm, king of Scots, as a pledge of his fidelity.  At Eadmund’s death in 946—­when he was stabbed in his royal hall by an outlaw—­his kingdom fell to his brother Eadred.  Two years later Northumbria again revolted, and chose Eric for its king.  Eadred harried and burnt the province, which he then handed over to an earl of his own creation, one of the Bamborough family.  The king himself died in 955, and was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig.  But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, and chose Eadwig’s brother, Eadgar, instead of their own Danish princes.  Eadwig died in 958, and Eadgar then became king of all three provinces; thus finally uniting the whole of Teutonic England into one kingdom.

Eadgar’s reign forms the climax of the West Saxon power.  It was, in fact, the only period when England can be said to have enjoyed any national unity under the Anglo-Saxon dynasties.  The strong hand of a priest gave peace for some years to the ill-organised mass.  Dunstan was probably the first Englishman who seriously deserves the name of statesman.  He was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside the great abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones of Arthur, and a good deal of the imaginative Celtic temper ran probably with the