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The greater the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the monarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to pieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in the person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under whose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length for the crown itself.
His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a little rest for the land; but Æthelwulf who mounted the throne on Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off by years of hard fighting.
Only I thought that it had been better if we had held to our Mercian overlords in Ecgberht's time than fight for this Wessex sovereign who was far from us; for that unhealed feud with Mercia seemed to leave us alone now. "Yet," said Ethelred, "these men are not such great chiefs, as it seems. Maybe their threats will come to naught."
Ecgberht's feeble successors in Wessex, and their feebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way step by step before the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred the Great was, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the recesses of his disappearing realm.
As regent for one of the scions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of his rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the veiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him, and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from France. The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
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