than the bow, and the sail was often striped in two or more colours. A few of the larger vessels may have been half-decked, or covered in at the extremities; but this is not certain. All were propelled by oars as well as by sail power. All were constructed with a view to being drawn up on shore, where they lay when not in use. Arrangements of pulleys, perhaps not very different from the rough capstans employed by modern English fishermen for their smaller boats, were arranged on the beach to facilitate the dragging of the vessels up and down. There is evidence, also, that some boats, intended exclusively for war purposes, were fitted with iron gunwales, or had their gunwales covered with iron.
At first the Anglo-Saxons in Britain were continually reinforced from the continent, but after a time they discouraged immigration. They grudged sharing with newcomers the advantages which they had already won, and they began a system of coast fortification designed to keep out further arrivals.
In the meanwhile, various chiefs reduced the interior of the island, and little by little a number of petty kingdoms sprang into existence. These, actuated by inevitable jealousies, were almost perpetually at war one with another, and, perhaps because sea warfare was at first more congenial than land warfare to the Saxon races, the internecine struggle seems to have weakened the seaboard kingdoms more rapidly than it weakened the inland ones.
The central kingdom of Mercia, which marched with the Welsh border behind which, thanks to the natural difficulties of the country, the fugitive Britons still held out, was, in the interval, gaining valuable experience in land warfare, and when the coast kingdoms began to be exhausted by their feuds, and had frittered away their naval strength, the opportunity of Mercia arose. First Penda, some time in alliance with the Welsh, and them Ethelbald and Offa in succession, enlarged the borders of the middle kingdom until they touched the sea in more places than one; and when Offa, by the exercise of his strong personality and indomitable energy, had made himself by far the most potent prince in England, he was wise enough to do what none of the more petty Anglo-Saxon princes had done before him—he created a great fleet. The possession of this enabled him to treat on equal terms with even so powerful a monarch as Charlemagne,[1] and it convinced him so clearly of the value of a powerful navy, that, according to the Saxon
- ↑ Will. of Malmesbury, i. 5; and Alcuin.
