| Anglo Saxon England No 8. |
If we discount the propagandist views of the West Saxon compiler of the 'Early English Annals', dismiss from the minds the knowledge of later events, and the base of our judgement solely upon what the West Saxons had achieved before the raids of the Northmen began, we must acknowledge that there was little reason to believe that England would owe its unification to Wessex. Three notable kings occupied her throne but each reign was separated by a century, during which the country became politically of no account and for most of the time under the dominance of Mercia. Of these rulers we have seen that Ceawlin (560-91) was the first to wage a large-scale attack upon his fellow -invaders and that he gained considerable success in his policy of aggrandisement.
But shortly after his death his work was more than undone: in 628 a.d. the Mercians took from the West Saxons the territory of Hwecce on the Lower Seven and about 661, under Wulfhere, they annexed the district of the Upper Thames which had been the main original settlement of the West Saxons, forced them to remain in the south-west and even handed the south of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight over to Sussex. Meanwhile there was little unity within Wessex itself, for she followed her usual custom of slicing up among under-kings whenever the occupant of the throne was too weak to exercise authority; this may have been a reflection of the days when the Gewisse lorded it in Hampshire and Wiltshire, for the word means 'companions' or'confederates'.
Despite these political disasters the men of Wessex slowly and quietly went on colonising Somerset, Dorset and Devon. Wessex reached the nadir of its political fortunes when it lay under the supremacy of the Mercian Wulfhere. Then for exactly forty years she leapt unexpectedly into the front rank to establish a temporary political equilibrium with Mercia and Northumbria. Though Cadwalla (685-8), an obscure descendant of Cerdic, did much, before he abdicated to go on pilgrimage to Rome, to rebuild the kingdom of Wessex by removing the under-kings and forcing the Isle of Wight, Sussex, Surrey, and even Kent to recognise his overlordship, it was his successor, Ine (688-726), who revealed the latent capabilities of the West Saxon people. He recognized the wisdom of abandoning the imperialism of Ceawlin which had extended northwards, and he concentrated on expansion along the south coast; on the east he kept Sussex, Surrey and Kent in his allegiance, on the west it would appear from his Laws, which very reasonably regulate relations between West Saxon and Briton, that he was giving royal encouragement and support to the colonists in Devon and East Cornwall. The real significance of Ine's reign, however, is in the indication that he was constucting his United Kingdom on a basis not purely military and therefore transient.
About 690 he issued his most valuable collection of customary laws. He has not the credit of producing the first of a remarkably long series of such collections, for that belongs to Ethelbert of Kent who drew up in 602 A.D., probably under Merovingian influence as much as through the inspiration of the Church, a series of regulations to protect person and property. Ine's legislation, however, represents a great advance in the declaration of law and its seventy-six clauses, dealing with the Church, the landed aristocracy and the Britons, throw a light upon the nature of Anglo-Saxon society and its economic and, particularly, agrarian problems, for which we will look for in vain. And we can see Roman Christianity at work a half-century after its introduction into Wessex by Birinus, for the code is riddled with ecclesiastical thought; for example, all children must be babtized within a month of their birth and Sunday must be kept as a holiday.
And the influence of Roman Christianity is portrayed in other directions at this time, for St. Aldhelm (c 640- 709), student of an Irish monk at Malmesbury as well as of Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury, was writing latin prose and verse, though in deliberate fantastic style and vocabulary, whilst Wynfrith, better known as St. Boniface c. 675-754 , left his native Devon at the age of forty to become, with the constant assistance of his fellow-countrymen who sent him both assistants and books, the great evangelizer of Germany andthe reformer of the Frankish Church.