and guarded the frontier of his new conquests by a fort on the banks of the Tone which has grown into the present Taunton.  The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole district which now bears the name of Somerset.  The conquest of Sussex and of Kent on his eastern border made Ine master of all Britain south of the Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king Ceolred in a bloody encounter at Wanborough in 715 seemed to establish the threefold division of the English race between three realms of almost equal power.  But able as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife that was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the disgust which drove him from the world.  He had feasted royally at one of his country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his queen bade him turn back thither.  The king returned to find his house stripped of curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he had slept with AEthelburh rested a sow with her farrow of pigs.  The scene had no need of the queen’s comment:  “See, my lord, how the fashion of this world passeth away!” In 726 he sought peace in a pilgrimage to Rome.  The anarchy which had driven Ine from the throne broke out in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to AEthelbald, the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian realm.  AEthelbald took up with better fortune the struggle of his people for supremacy over the south.  He penetrated to the very heart of the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege and capture of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended the war.  For twenty years the overlordship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of the Humber.  It was at the head of the forces not of Mercia only but of East-Anglia and Kent, as well as of the West-Saxons, that AEthelbald marched against the Welsh on his western border.

[Sidenote:  Baeda]

In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King found grounds for a hope that Northern Britain would also yield to his sway.  But the dream of a single England was again destined to be foiled.  Fallen as Northumbria was from its old glory, it still remained a great power.  Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith’s successors, Aldfrith and Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of Western Europe.  No schools were more famous than those of Jarrow and York.  The whole learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar.  Baeda—­the Venerable Bede as later times styled him—­was born nine years after the Synod of Whitby on ground which passed a year later to Benedict Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the Wear.  His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict’s house which was founded by his friend Ceolfrid.  Baeda never stirred from Jarrow.  “I spent my whole life in the same monastery,” he says, “and while attentive to the rule of my order and the service