other shires; and the Danes took horses, and rode over the land, almost ruining all the West Kentings.  The king and his witan resolved to send against them a land fyrd and a ship fyrd or raw levy.  But the spirit of the West Saxons was broken, and though the craft were gathered together, yet in the end, as the Chronicle plaintively puts it, “neither ship fyrd nor land fyrd wrought anything save toil for the folk, and the emboldening of their foes.”

 [1] See Mr. York-Powell’s “Scandinavian Britain.”

So, year after year, the endless invasion dragged on its course, and everywhere each shire of Wessex fought for itself against such enemies as happened to attack it.  At last, in the year 1002, AEthelred once more bought off the fleet, this time with 24,000 pounds; and some of the Danes obtained leave to settle down in Wessex.  But on St. Brice’s day, the king treacherously gave orders that all Danes in the immediate English territory should be massacred.  The West Saxons rose on the appointed night, and slew every one of them, including Gunhild, the sister of King Swegen, and a Christian convert.  It was a foolhardy attempt.  Swegen fell at once upon Wessex, and marched up and down the whole country, for two years.  He burnt Wilton and Sarum, and then sailed round to Norwich, where Ulfkytel, of East Anglia, gave him “the hardest hand-play” that he had ever known in England.  A year of famine intervened; but in 1006 Swegen returned again, harrying and burning Sandwich.  All autumn the West Saxon fyrd waited for the enemy, but in the end “it came to naught more than it had oft erst done.”  The host took up quarters in Wight, marched across Hants and Berks to Reading, and burned Wallingford.  Thence they returned with their booty to the fleet, by the very walls of the royal city.  “There might the Winchester folk behold an insolent host and fearless wend past their gate to sea.”  The king himself had fled into Shropshire.  The tone of utter despair with which the Chronicle narrates all these events is the best measure of the national degradation.  “There was so muckle awe of the host,” says the annalist, “that no man could think how man could drive them from this earth or hold this earth against them; for that they had cruelly marked each shire of Wessex with burning and with harrying.”  The English had sunk into hopeless misery, and were only waiting for a strong rule to rescue them from their misery.

The strong rule came at last.  Thorkell, a Danish jarl, marched all through Wessex, and for three years more his host pillaged everywhere in the South.  In 1011, they killed AElfheah, the archbishop of Canterbury, at Greenwich.  When the country was wholly weakened, Swegen turned southward once more, this time with all Northumbria and Mercia at his back.  In 1013 he sailed round to Humber mouth, and thence up the Trent, to Gainsborough.  “Then Earl Uhtred and all Northumbrians soon bowed to him, and all the folk in Lindsey; and sithence the folk of the Five