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Updated: June 22, 2025
With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it. And even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be avoided. Counting from the completion of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William's reign three distinct sources of disturbance.
B. Symons takes the story of Bjarki's fight with the winged monster to be a fusion of the story of Beowulf's fight with Grendel and that of his fight with the dragon. R.C. Boer identifies Bjarki with Beaw. In the West-Saxon line of kings, Beaw succeeded Scyld; in the poem Beowulf, Beowulf, the Danish king, succeeded Scyld; in Saxo's account, Frothi I succeeded Scyld.
Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon, Northman from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the country roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. It came with foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings broke local jealousies as they had never been broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwine and the Confessor.
Still, if Harold's accession was perfectly lawful, it was none the less strange and unusual. Except the Danish kings chosen under more or less of compulsion, he was the first king who did not belong to the West-Saxon kingly house. Such a choice could be justified only on the ground that that house contained no qualified candidate.
Alfred and his scholars treasured the rare fragments and copied them in the West-Saxon dialect. With the exception of Cædmon's Hymn, we have hardly a single leaf from the great literature of Northumbria in the dialect in which it was first written. WORKS OF ALFRED. Aside from his educational work, Alfred is known chiefly as a translator.
The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again laid the Danelaw at his feet. But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword. The completion of the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a priest.
The early hold of civilisation upon Kent is explicable. But when the influence of Rome begins to spread again over England you have distances covered which are astounding; there occur sporadic incidents of the highest importance in spots where they would be the least expected. Among the very first of these is the first baptism of a West-Saxon King.
Thus all vestiges of the old British Church of Cumbria had entirely disappeared before 1150. The old British Church in Cornwall and Devon came to an end in this way. In 884 King Alfred formed in Devonshire a West-Saxon see, and made Asser the Saxon Bishop. Cornwall was made to undergo several changes, and at last, in 1050, was merged in the see of Exeter.
William's enemies on the continent strove to turn the representative of the West-Saxon kings to help their ends. Edgar flits to and fro between Scotland and Flanders, and the King of the French tempts him with the offer of a convenient settlement on the march of France, Normandy, and Flanders.
To them the conquest was simply their transfer from one overlord to another, and it may be that in all there were men who preferred the overlordship of the Northman to the overlordship of the West-Saxon. But the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight, not for supremacy, but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by terror.
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