Even more important than any of these events were the changes which were going forward in the wide regions subject to the dominion of the Franks. Here the star of the great Austrasian house, which was represented by Charles Martel, Pippin and Charlemagne, was steadily rising. In this century they shouldered aside the last feeble representative of the Merovingian race, and seated themselves visibly on that Frankish throne behind which they and their sires had stood so long as mayors of the palace; and in the end, aspiring yet higher, at the very end of the century the greatest of the race received the imperial crown and was hailed as Carolus Augustus by the people of Rome in the city of the Cæsars. In this last series of events, as it happened, Englishmen self-exiled from their country took a prominent part. Willibrord, the apostle of the Frisians, baptised Pippin and foretold the exaltation of his house. Wynfrith, otherwise known as Boniface, following in his footsteps, persuaded or compelled Frisians, Thuringians and Hessians to embrace that religion which his own forefathers had accepted only three generations before, and with the religion induced them to accept also the ecclesiastical discipline of Rome. In his later missionary operations, gentle or forcible, he was strongly supported by the Austrasian Pippin, whom he repaid for that support by crowning him King of the Franks just half-way through the century. Moreover, it was another Englishman, the Northumbrian Alcuin, head of the great school for ecclesiastics attached to the church of York, who towards the close of the century accepted Charlemagne’s invitation to take up his abode at the Frankish court; became, so to speak, his literary prime minister, and being full himself of the memories of classical Rome, had no inconsiderable share in persuading his patron to revive the glories of the great world-empire, to pass from the condition of a mere King of the Franks into that of Roman Emperor. Thus, in this eighth century the Anglo-Saxon race was in various ways making its mark on Europe; and in our own island its literary history during this period is not without interest; but politically the century is one of the most sterile in all our annals. It was an age of little men, of decaying faith, of slumberous inaction, or else of sanguinary and chaotic strife. Northumbria especially, during this period, was falling fast and far from her former high estate. Mercia and Wessex were engaged in perpetual objectless war, not ennobled by any great names or chivalrous deeds. Yet possibly even this dreary time was looked back upon in the next century as a golden age, for it was, almost till its close, unmarked by foreign invasion. In the year 793 a new and more disastrous chapter was opened by the appearance on the horizon of the ships of the Vikings.