Free Battle of Hastings, The by Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood

state may have started in the fifth century as a conglomeration of independent kingdoms known loosely as the Saxon Heptarchy; but it
was a more homogeneous body than has always been recognized, in which the various petty kingdoms very soon had more in common with each other than with either the former British races whom they
encountered on arrival or with the continental districts from which they had come. They quickly came to share a language that would have been in some degree intelligible in any of them. The
Venerable Bede, born in the seventh century, described the languages of Britain as English,British (that is, Welsh), Scots, Pictish and Latin; he did not subdivide English
into West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian or Kentish. Individual kingdoms expanded or shrank by a natural process of ebb and flow. Every now and then, one particularly strong ruler would manage to
assert his power over his peers and achieve the slightly legendary title of Bretwalda or ruler of all Britain; this usually ceased at his death and the title lapsed until a successor or a
rival was strong enough to claim it. Inter-marriages between the different royal houses produced a network of alliances and kinships that meant there was more to connect the various kingdoms than
to separate them. The importance of the conversion of the English and the developing institutions of the Church can hardly be overestimated. Monasteries were being founded the length and breadth of
England, all working to the same rule, with monks and abbots (many of them from the most powerful and noble families in the country) moving between them; the importance of their unifying role is
obvious, as was that of the metropolitan sees of Canterbury and York.
    The ninth-century Viking invasions also played an important part in breaking down what by that time remained of the old divisions and pushing the various constituent parts of the country
together. To begin with, it seemed that the old Anglo-Saxon England would be submerged beneath the Scandinavian invaders; but after the fight-back by Alfred and his successors, England in more or
less its eleventh-century form had emerged with Wessex predominant, and Alfred’s grandson, King Athelstan, could without exaggeration call himself king of all England. It is said that King
Edgar, Athelstan’s nephew, made a point of circumnavigating his entire kingdom every year by sea. If he did, he must have taken in Scotland and Wales as well, over which the English kings
rarely had more than a nominal supremacy, but certainlythe King of Scotland and Kings of Wales were among the eight subject kings who reputedly rowed Edgar on the river Dee
at his coronation. More practically, he promoted the unity of his kingdom by introducing a uniform currency all over England that he alone controlled and that was withdrawn periodically, usually
every five or six years, and replaced by another. Apart from providing a significant source of royal revenue for himself and his successors, since all moneyers had to buy the new dies from the king
when this happened, this reform promoted the development of the economy at home and abroad, where English coins were much respected. This was to be one of the English customs that the Conqueror did
not abolish.
    Thus, when the Viking raids resumed in the tenth century, the raiders found a united country in which the Byrhtnoth who confronted them at Maldon in 991 may have been a nobleman of the former
kingdom of the East Saxons but who announced himself to them as ‘Æthelred’s earl’, fighting to protect the West Saxon Æthelred’s England, his land and his
people, with an army that included at least one Mercian and one Northumbrian, and representatives of all the social classes of England, united in a determination to defend their country. If, as has
been suggested, The Battle of Maldon was not written until about thirty years after the battle, it looks even more like a deliberate attempt to portray