Lastly, the Danes turned against Mercia and Wessex.  In 871, a host under Bagsecg and Halfdene came to Reading, which belonged to the latter territory, when the local ealdorman engaged them and won a slight victory.  Shortly afterward the West Saxon king AEthelred, with his brother AElfred, came up, and engaged them a second time with worse success.  Three other bloody battles followed, in all of which the Danes were beaten with heavy loss; but the West Saxons also suffered severely.  For three years the host moved up and down through Mercia and Wessex; and the Mercians stood by, aiding neither side, but “making peace with the host” from time to time.  At last, however, in 874, the heathens finally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself.  “The host fared from Lindsey to Repton, and there sat for the winter, and drove King Burhred over sea, two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom; and they subdued all the land.  And Burhred went to Rome, and there settled; and his body lies in St. Mary’s Church, in the school of the English kin.  And in the same year they gave the kingdom of Mercia in ward to Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostages that it should be ready for them on whatso day they willed; and that he would be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, for the behoof of the host.”  Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains.

This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarily tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highly important and interesting facts.  It is impossible not to be struck with the extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invaders overran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states.  We cannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmness of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by AElfred in Wessex.  The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of native Northumbrian and Mercian accounts.  We might, perhaps, find, had we fuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fight for their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead us to suppose.  Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness of our authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathen kingdom was established in the pure English land of Baeda and Cuthberht, while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own for ever in peninsular and half-Celtic Wessex.

The difference is doubtless due in part to merely surface causes.  East Anglia had long lost her autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia, was sometimes broken up under several ealdormen.  For her and for Northumbria the conquest was but a change from a West Saxon to a Danish master.  The house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and tribal organisation, and was incapable of substituting a central organisation in its place.  With no roads and no communications such a centralising scheme is really impracticable.  The disintegrated English kingdoms made little show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord.  They could accept a Dane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon.