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One body, conquering the Britons in the East, and settling there, called their kingdom Essex; another body settled in the West, and called their kingdom Wessex; the Northfolk, or Norfolk people, established themselves in one place; the Southfolk, or Suffolk people, established themselves in another; and gradually seven kingdoms or states arose in England, which were called the Saxon Heptarchy.
He took the throne of Wessex in 802, for twelve years enjoyed a peaceful reign, then became involved in wars, first with the Cornish and afterward with the Mercians. His victories in these wars resulted in the final establishment of his authority over the entire heptarchy, and this made him in fact, though not in name, the first real king of England.
The first to do so was the now defunct Examiner, which, in the impression bearing date July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex Labourer," the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west counties, and his presentation in these stories.
The history of the whole world for three thousand years is the history of a unity larger than the small kingdom of the Heptarchy type, endeavouring to establish itself under the stress of these discoveries of horse-traffic and shipping and the written word, the history, that is, of the consequences of the partial shattering of the barriers that had been effectual enough to prevent the fusion of more than tribal communities through all the long ages before the dawn of history.
If the king of Wessex had been elected king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.
The same influence contributed to extend it in the other kingdoms of the Heptarchy, the sovereigns of which were generally converted by their wives.
The Saxons rescued the Britons from their plight, but themselves became masters of the country which they had delivered. They were joined by the Angles and Jutes, and divided the territory into the kingdoms known in history as the Saxon Heptarchy, which had an existence of about two hundred and fifty years.
But it became increasingly difficult for the small man to retain his holding. He needed protection, especially during the civil wars of the Heptarchy and the Danish inroads which followed.
But I would endeavour to teach them that they can get nothing by Home Rule, that their taxes would be heavier, their property less secure, their lives less safe, their general position more debased, and their chances of national success more remote than ever." "You can never teach them, except by the slow lesson of habit. The Heptarchy didn't mould itself into a nation in a day."
This ceaseless seeking for a better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our present as that is to the times of Alfred.
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