This wool-selling of the villages, we may be sure, was done in a very small way at first, but it grew and grew until it became very important and a source of great riches, as wealth was then estimated, to England. This was when the carrying of the wool over-Channel, to the Continent, had been arranged for, and there was a regular trade going on. That, however, was not to happen until the days when the Normans were rulers of England and could keep their own kinsmen, the Scandinavian rovers, from piracy in the narrow sea straits. At the point of time to which we have now brought down our story, say 800, when Charlemagne was anointed Emperor by the Pope in Rome, the Danes, from Denmark and perhaps from Norway and Sweden too, were constantly vexing and harrying all the eastern and southern coasts of England and the opposite coasts of the Continent. Their way was to sail up the rivers with their ships, to take everything which they could easily carry away, to work havoc of every kind, by fire and sword--then back to their ships and away again. At this time you will note that the bigger towns were all in the river valleys, as we have seen already, {112} and also that most of them were not very far inland. In Britain the Romans had fixed their capital city in the north, at York, but after they went away the important part of England was the south. It was the part near the Continent, where all civilisation and religion and good things came from--also, where the conquerors of England were apt to come from. The narrowest sea between the two was what we now call the Straits of Dover. All these circumstances led to the establishment or to the growth of Canterbury as one of the great cities of England. I write of England as of one country, but you will remember that it still was a disunited, a divided England. It remained so disunited, and vexed by constant wars between the rival kingdoms, until brought under one rule in 827, by the power and wisdom of the great King Egbert, who had come to the throne of Wessex in A.D. 800, the very year of Charlemagne's consecration at Rome, and held authority over all England from 827 till his death in 836. I write this vague and indefinite phrase "held authority" on purpose, because it certainly was not a very definite rule that he held over the whole country, and it must have differed in different parts. He even conquered Wales and all the Celtic part of Britain except Cumbria--our modern Cumberland. It was towards the end of his reign that his more or less united kingdom began to be seriously harassed by the Danish sea-rovers attacking the eastern and southern coasts. [Sidenote: The sites of the cities]