Burgs, and shortly after, all the host by north of Watling-street; and men gave him hostages of each shire.”  Swegen at once led the united army into England, leaving his son Cnut in Denalagu with the ships and hostages.  He marched to Oxford, which received him; then to the royal city of Winchester, which made no resistance.  At London AEthelred was waiting; and for a time the town held out.  So Swegen marched westward, and took Bath.  There, the thegns of the Welsh-kin counties—­Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall—­bowed to him and gave him hostages.  “When he had thus fared, he went north to his ships, and all the folk held him then as full king.”  London itself gave way.  AEthelred fled to Wight, and thence to Normandy.  He had married Ymma, the daughter of Richard the Fearless; and he now took refuge with her brother, Richard the Good.

Next year Swegen died, and the West Saxon witan sent back for AEthelred.  No lord was dearer to them, they said, than their lord by kin.  But the host had already chosen Cnut; and the host had a stronger claim than the witan.  For two years AEthelred carried on a desultory war with the intruders, and then died, leaving it undecided.  His son Eadmund, nicknamed Ironside, continued the contest for a few months; but in the autumn of 1016 he died—­poisoned, the English said, by Cnut—­and Cnut succeeded to undisputed sway.  He at once assumed Wessex as his own peculiar dominion, and the political history of the English ends for two centuries.  Their social life went on, of course, as ever; but it was the life of a people in strict subjection to foreign rulers—­Danish, Norman, or Angevin.  The story of the next twenty-five years at least belongs to the chronicles of Scandinavian Britain.

At the end of that time, however, there was a slight reaction.  Cnut and his sons had bound the kingdom roughly into one; and the death of Harthacnut left an opportunity for the return of a descendant of AElfred.  But the English choice fell upon one who was practically a foreigner.  Eadward, son of AEthelred by Ymma of Normandy, had lived in his mother’s country during the greater part of his life.  Recalled by Earl Godwine and the witan, he came back to England a Norman, rather than an Englishman.  The administration remained really in the hands of Godwine himself, and of the Danish or Danicised aristocracy.  But Mercia and Northumbria still stood apart from Wessex, and once procured the exile of Godwine himself.  The great earl returned, however, and at his death passed on his power to his son Harold, a Danicised Englishman of great rough ability, such as suited the hard times on which he was cast.  Harold employed the lifetime of Eadward, who was childless, in preparing for his own succession.  The king died in 1066, and Harold was quietly chosen at once by the witan.  He was the last Englishman who ever sat upon the throne of England.