the worship of evil spirits, and gave up the wicked customs of their fathers, and received the sacrament of Christian baptism, mingling with the Franks till at last they were reckoned one race with them.’ [Sidenote: Complete subjection of Saxony.] The complete subjection and conversion of Saxony is marked by the creation of the first bishoprics in the country at this period. Charles established bishops at Bremen, Münster, and Paderborn in 804-6, to serve respectively as the religious centres of northern, western, and southern Saxony. Others were afterwards added at Hamburg, Osnabruck, Verden, Hildesheim, Minden, and Magdeburg, but these foundations belong to the next generation. Round these bishops’ sees grew up the first towns of Saxony, for hitherto its inhabitants had lived a purely rural life, and never gathered within walls. The possession of Saxony brought Charles in the end of his reign into hostile contact with a race almost unknown to his ancestors, but destined to be only too well known to his sons—the Danes of the Jutland peninsula and the Scandinavian isles, who dwelt beyond the Eider on the Nordalbingian border. The advent of a new and militant Christian power into the recesses of the unknown North seems to have stirred up the Danes to unwonted activity. They must have heard from Witikind, and the other Saxon exiles who took refuge with them, many tales of the untiring energy and unrelenting severity of the great king of the Franks, and feared lest his strong hand would be stretched out beyond the Eider to add them to the list of his tributaries, and force them to accept his religion. [Sidenote: Wars with the Danes.] To guard against the further advance of the Franks, king Godfred built in 808 all along his frontier, at the narrowest point of the isthmus of Schleswig, a great earthwork from sea to sea, long known as the Dannewerk, and famed in wars down to the last conflict of German and Dane in 1863. But Godfred did not confine himself to defensive works; he began to make piratical descents all along the Frisian and Flemish coasts as far as the mouth of the Seine, and at the same time attacked the Abotrites and Wiltzes, the Slavonic vassals of Charles on the Baltic. Godfred did much damage in Frisia, and actually succeeded for a moment in crushing the Abotrites and subduing the Wiltzes. He gave the Franks much trouble, since he ravaged all the coast where it was unguarded, but took to his ships again when a large army was sent against him. In 810 he penetrated so far into Frisia, that he spoke, in boasting mood, of paying Charles a visit at Aachen. But in the same year he was murdered by his own people, and his nephew and successor Hemming made peace with the Franks. The peace was ill-kept, for we hear of isolated Danish raids in the last years of Charles’s reign and a fleet of war-ships, which were built in the ports of Neustria for the defence of the coast, does not seem to have protected the Frisian waters very efficiently.