Yet so little did the English still realise the terrible danger of the heathen invasion, that next year AEthelwulf was fighting the Welsh of Wales; and two years after he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, “with great pomp, and dwelt there twelve months, and then fared homeward.”  In that same year, “heathen men sat over winter in Sheppey.”

After AEthelwulf’s death the English resistance grew fainter and fainter.  In 860, under his second son, AEthelberht, a Danish host took Winchester itself by storm.  Five years later, a heathen army settled in Thanet, and the men of Kent agreed to buy peace of them—­the first sign of that evil habit of buying off the Dane, which grew gradually into a fixed custom.  But the host stole away during the truce for collecting the money, and harried all Kent unawares.

Meanwhile, we hear little of the North.  The almost utter destruction of its records during the heathen domination restricts us for information to the West Saxon chronicles; and they have little to tell us about any but their own affairs.  In 866, however, we learn that there came a great heathen host to East Anglia—­an organised expedition under two chieftains—­“and took winter quarters there, and were horsed; and the East Anglians made peace with them.”  Next year, this permanent host sailed northward to Humber, and attacked York.  The Northumbrians, as usual, were at strife among themselves, two rival kings fighting for the supremacy.  The burghers of York admitted the heathen host within the walls.  Then the rival kings fell upon the town, broke the slender fortifications, and rushed into the city.  The Danes attacked them both, and defeated them with great slaughter.  Northumbria passed at once into the power of the heathen.  Their chiefs, Ingvar and Ubba, erected Deira into a new Danish kingdom, leaving Bernicia to an English puppet; and Northumbria ceases to exist for the present as a factor in Anglo-Saxon history.  We must hand it over for sixty years to the Scandinavian division of this series.

In 868, Ingvar and Ubba advanced again into Mercia and beset Nottingham.  Then the under-king Burhred called in the aid of his over-lord, AEthelred of Wessex, who came to his assistance with a levy.  “But there was no hard fight there, and the Mercians made peace with the host.”  In 870, the heathen overran East Anglia, and destroyed the great monastery of Peterborough, probably the richest religious house in all England.  Eadmund, the under-king, came against them with the levy, but they slew him; and the people held him for a martyr, whose shrine at Bury St. Edmunds grew in after days into the holiest spot in East Anglia.  The Danes harried the whole country, burnt the monasteries, and annexed Norfolk and Suffolk as a second Danish kingdom.  East Anglia, too, disappears for a while from our English annals.