On one occasion Alfred succeeded in taking possession of Hastings’s camp, when he had left it in security, as he supposed, to go off for a time by sea on an expedition.  Alfred’s soldiers found Hastings’s wife and children in the camp, and took them prisoners.  They sent the terrified captives to Alfred, to suffer, as they supposed, the long and cruel confinement or the violent death to which the usages of those days consigned such unhappy prisoners.  Alfred baptized the children, and then sent them, with their mother, loaded with presents and proofs of kindness, back to Hastings again.

This generosity made no impression upon the heart of Hastings, or, at least, it produced no effect upon his conduct.  He continued the war as energetically as ever.  Months passed away and new re-enforcements arrived, until at length he felt strong enough to undertake an excursion into the very heart of the country.  He moved on for a time with triumphant success; but this very success was soon the means of turning the current against him again.  It aroused the whole country through which he was passing.  The inhabitants flocked to arms.  They assembled at every rallying point, and, drawing up on all sides nearer and nearer to Hastings’s army, they finally stopped his march, and forced him to call all his forces in, and intrench himself in the first place of retreat that he could find.  Thus his very success was the means of turning his good fortune into disaster.

And then, in the same way, the success of Alfred and the Saxons soon brought disaster upon them too, in their turn; for, after succeeding in shutting Hastings closely in, and cutting off his supplies of food, they maintained their watch and ward over their imprisoned enemies so closely as to reduce them to extreme distress—­a distress and suffering which they thought would end in their complete and absolute submission.  Instead of ending thus, however, it aroused them to desperation.  Under the influence of the phrensy which such hopeless sufferings produce in characters like theirs, they burst out one day from the place of their confinement, and, after a terrible conflict, which choked up a river which they had to pass with dead bodies and dyed its waters with blood, the great body of the starving desperadoes made their escape, and, in a wild and furious excitement, half a triumph and half a retreat, they went back to the eastern coast of the island, where they found secure places of refuge to receive them.

In the course of the subsequent campaigns, a party of the Danes came up the River Thames with a fleet of their vessels, and an account is given by some of the ancient historians of a measure which Alfred resorted to to entrap them, which would seem to be scarcely credible.  The account is, that he altered the course of the river by digging new channels for it, so as to leave the vessels all aground, when, of course, they became helpless, and fell an easy