unsullied heart, and a clear, strong intelligence, with unusual inclination toward an intellectual life.

Few Kings have better deserved the title of "great." With him began the first conception of National law. He prepared a code for the administration of justice in his Kingdom, which was prefaced by the Ten Commandments, and ended with the Golden Rule; while in his leisure hours he gave coherence and form to the literature of the time. Taking the writings of Cædmon, Bæda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius; translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of others upon a wide range of subjects.

He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of her culture and literature besides. The people of Wantage, his native town, did well, in 1849, to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of the birth of the great King Alfred.

But a condition of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings began to be clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed," the people were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this class, in which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy but natural fruits.

A slave or "unfree" class had come with the Teutons from their native land. This small element had for centuries now been swelled by captives taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and debt, which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the collar of servitude. The slave was not under the lash; but he was a mere chattel, having no more part than cattle (from whom this title is derived) in the real life of the state.

In addition to this, political and social changes had been long modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them lower, until the old English freedom was lost.

The "folk-moot" and "Witenagemot"* were heard of no more. The life of the early English State had been in its "folk-moot," and hence rested upon the individual English freeman, who knew no superior but God, and the law. Now, he had sunk into the mere "villein," bound to follow his lord to the field, to give him his personal service, and to look to him alone for justice. With the decline of the freeman (or of popular government) came Anglo-Saxon degeneracy, which made him an easy prey to the Danes.

*Witenagemot—a Council composed of "Witan" or "Wise Men."

The Northmen were a perpetual menace and scourge to England and Scotland. There never could be any feeling of permanent security while that hostile flood was always ready to press in through an unguarded spot on the coast. The sea wolves and robbers from Norway came devouring, pillaging, and ravaging, and then away again to their own homes or lairs. Their boast was that they "scorned to earn by sweat what they might win by blood." But the Northmen from Denmark were of a different sort. They were looking for permanent conquest, and had dreams of Empire, and, in fact, had had more or less of a grasp upon English soil for centuries before Alfred; and one of his greatest achievements was driving these hated invaders out of England. In 1013, under the leadership of Sweyn, they once more poured in upon the land, and after a brief but fierce struggle a degenerate England was gathered into the iron hand of the Dane.

Canute, the son of Sweyn, continued the successes of his father, conquering in Scotland Duncan (slain later by Macbeth), and proceeded to realize his dream of a great Scandinavian empire, which should include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and England. He was one of those monumental men who mark the periods in the pages of History, and yet child enough to command the tides to cease, and when disobeyed, was so humiliated, it is said, he never again placed a crown upon his head, acknowledging the presence of a King greater than himself.

Conqueror though he was, the Dane was not exactly a foreigner in England. The languages of the two nations were almost the same, and a race affinity took away much of the bitterness of the subjugation, while Canute ruled more as a wise native King than as a Conqueror.

But the span of life, even of a founder of Empire, is short. Canute's sons were degenerate, cruel, and in forty years after the Conquest had so exasperated the Anglo-Saxons that enough of the primitive spirit returned, to throw off the foreign yoke, and the old Saxon line was restored in Edward, known as "the Confessor."

Edward had qualities more fitted to adorn the cloister than the throne. He was more of a Saint than King, and was glad to leave the affairs of his realm in the hands of Earl Godwin. This man was the first great English statesman who had been neither Priest nor King. Astute, powerful, dexterous, he was virtual ruler of the Kingdom until the death of the childless King Edward in 1066, when Godwin's son Harold was called to the empty throne.

Foreign royal alliances have caused no end of trouble in the life of Kingdoms. A marriage between a Saxon King and a Norman Princess, in about the year 1000 A.D., has made a vast deal of history. This Princess of Normandy, was the grandmother of the man, who was to be known as "William the Conqueror." In the absence of a direct heir to the English throne, made vacant by Edward's death, this descent gave a shadowy claim to the ambitious Duke across the Channel, which he was not slow to use for his own purposes.

He asserted that Edward had promised that he should succeed him, and that Harold, the son of Godwin, had assured him of his assistance in securing his rights upon the death of Edward the Confessor. A tremendous indignation stirred his righteous soul when he heard of the crowning of Harold; not so much at the loss of the throne, as at the treachery of his friend.

In the face of tremendous opposition and difficulties, he got together his reluctant Barons and a motley host, actually cutting down the trees with which to create a fleet, and then, depending upon pillage for subsistence, rushed to face victory or ruin.

The Battle of Senlac (or Hastings) has been best told by a woman's hand in the famous Bayeux Tapestry. An arrow pierced the unhappy Harold in the eye, entering the brain, and the head which had worn the crown of England ten short months lay in the dust, William, with wrath unappeased, refusing him burial.

William, Duke of Normandy, was King of England. Not alone that. He claimed that he had been rightful King ever since the death of his cousin Edward the Confessor; and that those who had supported Harold were traitors, and their lands confiscated to the crown. As nearly all had been loyal to Harold, the result was that most of the wealth of the Nation was emptied into William's lap, not by right of conquest, but by English law.

Feudalism had been gradually stifling old English freedom, and the King saw himself confronted with a feudal baronage, nobles claiming hereditary, military, and judicial power independent of the King, such as degraded the Monarchy and riveted down the people in France for centuries. With the genius of the born ruler and conqueror, William discerned the danger and its remedy. Availing himself of the early legal constitution of England, he placed justice in the old local courts of the