Emma, to wife.  The same dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the northern mercenaries whom the king had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting force against their brethren; and an order of AEthelred brought about a general massacre of them on St. Brice’s day.  Wedding and murder however proved feeble defences against Swein.  His fleet reached the coast in 1003, and for four years he marched through the length and breadth of southern and eastern England, “lighting his war-beacons as he went” in blazing homestead and town.  Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare for a later and more terrible onset.  But there was no rest for the realm.  The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia.  In 1012 Canterbury was taken and sacked, AEltheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there in default of ransom brutally slain.  The Danes set him in the midst of their husting, pelting him with bones and skulls of oxen, till one more pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe.  Meanwhile the court was torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels between the court-thegns in their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels between these favourites and the nobles whom they superseded in the royal councils.  The King’s policy of finding aid among his new ministers broke down when these became themselves ealdormen.  With their local position they took up the feudal claims of independence; and Eadric, whom AEthelred raised to be ealdorman of Mercia, became a power that overawed the Crown.  In this paralysis of the central authority all organization and union was lost.  “Shire would not help other” when Swein returned in 1013.  The war was terrible but short.  Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried, churches plundered, men slaughtered.  But, with the one exception of London, there was no attempt at resistance.  Oxford and Winchester flung open their gates.  The thegns of Wessex submitted to the northmen at Bath.  Even London was forced at last to give way, and AEthelred fled over-sea to a refuge in Normandy.

[Sidenote:  Cnut]

He was soon called back again.  In the opening of 1014 Swein died suddenly at Gainsborough; and the spell of terror was broken.  The Witan recalled “their own born lord,” and AEthelred returned to see the Danish fleet under Swein’s son, Cnut, sail away to the North.  It was but to plan a more terrible return.  Youth of nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the first the vigour of his temper.  Setting aside his brother he made himself king of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh attack on England, whose king and nobles were again at strife, and where a bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and AEthelred’s son Eadmund Ironside broke the strength of the realm.  The desertion of Eadric to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open England to his arms; Wessex and Mercia submitted to him; and though the loyalty