Expansion of Wessex

Alfred was followed by a line of noteworthy kings who maintained the dignity of Wessex and extended its power, not only over Danish territory, but in the regions occupied by the Celts as well. Under Eadward the Elder (901-924), thelstan (924-940), Eadmund (940 946), and Eadgar (959-975), the boundaries of Wessex were widened by the addition of conquered territory, its laws and methods of government carried north of the Thames, and its inhabitants and the Danes bound together into a closer union.

The steps in this process may be briefly traced. From 906 to 924, under Eadward the Elder, the West Saxon arms were borne against East Anglia, which submitted in 921; against the kings of central Wales, who acknowledged Eadward's supremacy in 922; and finally against the Five Boroughs, the last of which, Nottingham, was captured in 924. Thus central England was added to Wessex, and the king's authority was recognized as far north as the Humber. The Chronicle tells us, too, that in that year Constantin III, the king of the united Picts and Scots, Eldred, the king of Bernicia, and Donald, king of the Strathclyde Britons, chose Eadward for their father and lord; but this is probably a mediaeval exaggeration, bearing witness to the greatness of Eadward's fame as a warrior.

thelstan carried the work of his predecessors a step farther. He warred with the Britons in Wales, annexed Danish Northumbria, and when in 937 an alliance of Scots, Danes, and Strathclyde Britons was formed against him, won the famous battle of Brunanburh. This battle made thelstan known on the Continent, and is celebrated in one of the finest of the Anglo-Saxon songs.

thelstan died in 940, and his successor, Eadmund, was compelled, by a dangerous revolt of the Danes in the Five Boroughs, to withdraw for the moment from the north. But with this uprising checked he was able in 944 to take up his father's work. He drove the Danish king from Northumbria and compelled him to flee to Ireland ; he turned westward. marched into Strathclyde, through which the Danes from Ireland had been accustomed to bring assistance to the Danes of Northumbria, and harried the land. Then he delivered a portion of it, modern Cumberland, to Malcolm I, nephew and successor of Constantin who had aided him at Brunanburh, to be held by Malcolm as a "fellow-worker."

Eadred, Eadmund's successor, renewed the compact, but, as was to be expected, it was not kept by turbulent Britons and Scots constantly at war among themselves and living on a northern frontier so far away from Wessex. The existence of such a compact testifies to the fact that the power of Wessex had been carried far to the north and that its king was recognized in some way as the superior of the tribal kings of the Scots and Britons. By the expansion of Wessex a national England was gradually coming into existence.