Then a grouping was made of some of the hundreds, and this group of hundreds was then called a "shire." The title of earl came to be given to the lord, no longer of a single village, but of a shire--a much more important post. The earl of the shire was appointed, like the thane, by the king. There were "hundred courts," as we noticed before, which the freemen, so-called, of the village could attend and vote in. And there were also "shire courts," held less often, which also the freemen might attend, and wherein also they might vote. The president of the shire court was the earl. We may compare the earl and his shire, in England, with the comte, or count, in France, with his comté or county. Thus, or somewhat thus, went the story of the people's lives in Europe throughout the time of the rule of the Danish kings in Britain and up to its conquest by William of Normandy in 1066. {118} CHAPTER XIV THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE SEA-ROVERS It is in the reign of King Egbert that we begin to hear of the Danes coming as sea-rovers and raiding the coasts on both sides of the English Channel. They came, they harried and stole, and went away again. [Sidenote: Alfred the Great] That was bad. But it began to be worse when they did not go away again, when they came in such numbers that they could actually dare to establish themselves for the winter up some river. They had then come to stay. Within thirty years after the death of Egbert they became so strong that they took the towns of York and Nottingham. The English kingdom was again, at this time, disunited. This was partly owing to the custom--which proved fatal to the union, of the continental empire also--for a king, at his death, to divide up his kingdom, by will, and give portions to two or more of his sons. But in a fortunate hour for England, Alfred, who won the name of "the Great," came to the throne of Wessex in 871. He fought the Danes on land, uniting the people of Kent and Essex with his own Wessex men. He fought them with varying success, on the whole getting the better of them. He also (and you might make a note of this as the beginning of Britain's naval power) defeated some of their ships with his own fleet. Whereupon came many more Danes with many more ships; and English and Danes had to meet in many a battle and skirmish until a decisive victory at {119} length enabled Alfred to come to a settlement with them. Even so, the settlement was far from establishing him as sovereign over all England. An arrangement was made by which the Danes were to occupy, undisturbed, the eastern side, and were to leave the English in peaceable possession of the west. We have spoken before of that old Roman road called Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester: you may take that line as about the boundary line between the two peoples who now held England.