battle, and after a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender and to bind themselves by a solemn peace or “frith” at Wedmore in Somerset.  In form the Peace of Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of Britain to its invaders.  All Northumbria, all East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line which stretched from Thames’ mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along the Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left subject to the northmen.  Throughout this “Danelaw”—­as it was called—­the conquerors settled down among the conquered population as lords of the soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly in its central districts, but everywhere guarding jealously their old isolation and gathering in separate “heres” or armies round towns which were only linked in loose confederacies.  The peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex itself.  But in saving Wessex it saved England.  The spell of terror was broken.  The tide of invasion turned.  From an attitude of attack the northmen were thrown back on an attitude of defence.  The whole reign of AElfred was a preparation for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back from the pirates the land they had won.

[Sidenote:  AElfred]

What really gave England heart for such a struggle was the courage and energy of the King himself.  Alfred was the noblest as he was the most complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is loveable, in the English temper.  He combined as no other man has ever combined its practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its profound sense of duty, the reserve and self-control that steadies in it a wide outlook and a restless daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and passionate religion.  Religion indeed was the groundwork of AElfred’s character.  His temper was instinct with piety.  Everywhere throughout his writings that remain to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir him to outbursts of ecstatic adoration.  But he was no mere saint.  He felt none of that scorn of the world about him which drove the nobler souls of his day to monastery or hermitage.  Vexed as he was by sickness and constant pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism.  His rare geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave colour and charm to his life.  A sunny frankness and openness of spirit breathes in the pleasant chat of his books, and what he was in his books he showed himself in his daily converse.  AElfred was in truth an artist, and both the lights and shadows of his life were those of the artistic temperament.  His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings of travellers and scholars, betray an imaginative restlessness that longs to break out of the narrow world of experience which hemmed him in.  At one time he jots down news of a voyage to the unknown seas of the north.  At another he listens to tidings which his envoys bring