Though the Anglo-Saxon monarchy wanted that element of authority which the kings of other German tribes drew from the Roman government by transmission or succession, yet it had strengthened itself, like the others, by union with the Church. Alfred, too, was at Rome in his boyhood: it stood him in good stead that he had been anointed, and, as men said, adopted by a Roman pope. In the reconquest of the land, Church ideas had played an important part. It was impossible to drive out the invading foes, they could only be held in check; never would they have submitted to the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth had they not at the same time been converted to Christianity. Nothing, moreover, contributed more to this than the effort, which was then the order of the day in the Christian world, to base the organisation of the Church on monasticism: from Italy this tendency spread to Germany, from South France to North, from thence to England, where it produced its greatest effect. Now the power of conversion is inherent only in sharply-defined doctrines; and it was precisely this tendency that penetrated the Northern natures: the sons of the Vikings became the champions of monachism; to the fury with which the fathers had destroyed the monasteries succeeded in the sons a zeal to restore them. And in what good stead this stood the Anglo-Saxon kings! The kingly power obtained, through the splendour which the union with religion bestowed on its victorious arms, a reverential recognition by the old native population as well as by the invaders. Alfred's grandson had regained Northumbria by a somewhat doubtful title, and had then maintained his right in a great battle, renowned in song; his great-grandson, Edgar, in one of his charters thanks the grace of God which had permitted him to extend his rule further than his predecessors, over the islands and seas as far as Norway, and over a great part of Ireland. We are not to look on it as a mere piece of vanity, when he seeks after new titles for his power, when he calls himself Basileus and Imperator; the former is the title of the Eastern, the latter of the Western emperors; he will not yield the precedence to either the one or the other, though the latter are so closely related to him by blood. We cannot express the feeling of a supreme power, independent of men, derived from the grace of God, the King of kings, more strongly than it was expressed by Edgar under Dunstan's influence; the ruling motives of life in Church and State make it conceivable that a monkish hierarch, such as Dunstan, shared, as it were, the King's power, and shaped the course of the authority of the state. It was still the ancestral Anglo-Saxon crown which glittered on Edgar's head, but, if we may so say, its splendour had at the same time received a monkish and hierarchic colouring. NOTES: