The decrees of the undated Council of Enham^[654] are marked as belonging to the same period, by the repetition of nearly the same enactments, often in nearly the same words. They contain much the same moral and religious exhortations, and much the same ordinances for the mustering of the land and sea-force, for the repair of the forts and bridges, for the punishment of deserters and of those |drawn up in the name of the Witan only.| who damage a ship of war. But the most remarkable thing about this statute is that it is drawn up in the name of the Witan only, without any mention of the King.^[655] But there is no need to infer that there was in this case any departure from the usual legislative process. The Witan only are mentioned; but the action of the Witan implies the action of the King, just as in many places in the Chronicles, where the King only is mentioned, the action of the King implies the action of the Witan. We may indeed fairly suppose that both these statutes were more distinctly the work of the Witan, and less distinctly the work of the King, than in most other cases. The laws of Ælfred were the work of the King, which he submitted to the Witan for their approval.^[656] So, we may be sure, was the case with the laws of the other great Kings who came after him. But we may well believe that the laws of Æthelred were the work of Æthelred only in the sense in which the Great Charter was the work of John. Both statutes breathe the same spirit, a spirit widely different from anything likely to come forth from Æthelred or his immediate counsellors. They clearly sprang from the best elements of wisdom that the Great Council of the nation could still supply. They show a real desire to mend the ways of the nation, to make satisfaction to God and man for the past, and for the future to work manfully alike for national reformation and for the national defence. The whole tone is at once pious and patriotic; and the piety is of a kind which, while it strictly enforces every ecclesiastical observance, by no means forgets the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and truth. In all this we can hardly fail to trace the hand of good Archbishop Ælfheah.

A fleet then was to be raised, a fleet such as guarded the land in the days of Ælfred and Eadgar. But how was the fleet to be raised? This question leads us to a most remarkable statement in our authorities, the details of which are puzzling in the highest degree, but as to the general bearing of which there can be no doubt.^[657] The cost of the fleet was to be borne by the nation at large, individuals or districts being made to contribute according to their means and extent. In those days land was of course taken as the only standard of property on which the assessment could be made. It does not appear that either individuals or districts were called on to make any contributions in money to the royal treasury. They were to contribute in kind, according to a scale laid down by the Witan, in the shape of ships, or of things needful for the ships or their crews. There can be no doubt that, in the reign of Æthelred, this was a much wiser arrangement; money which had to pass through the hands either of the King or of his favourite would most |The system not a new one.| likely not have appeared again in the form of ships. The practice was not one which was invented for the nonce. There is evidence to show that a contribution of ships in |995–1005.| kind was the ancient custom. In the will of Archbishop Ælfric, which must of course have been drawn up a few years before this time, that prelate bequeaths a ship to his flock in Kent and another to his former flock in Wiltshire.^[658] This gift must have been intended to relieve the people of those shires from some part of their share in this doubtless heavy impost. It is hardly possible that the bequest can have any other object; one can think of no other motive which could lead an Archbishop or any one else to leave |The contribution made by shires.| a ship to a shire, especially to an inland shire. This evidence seems to show that the contribution was made by shires, that each shire had to furnish a certain number of ships according to its extent, the assessment on individuals or on smaller districts being doubtless settled in the Scirgemót. This was most likely the old and regular way of raising a fleet, the way in which the great fleets of Ælfred |This assessment the origin of ship-money.| and Eadgar had been raised. But this vote of King Æthelred’s Witenagemót does not only look backward; it looks forward. There can be no doubt that, in this ancient way of gathering together a fleet, we have the germ of the famous ship-money of the seventeenth century.^[659] The writs discovered by Noy calling on maritime, and sometimes on inland, counties and places to furnish ships, and |1634–5.| the writs issued by Charles the First in pursuance of the precedents thus discovered, undoubtedly take their root in the statute of the thirtieth year of King Æthelred. They are the degenerate successors of that great vote of the Witenagemót of 1008, just as that vote was the more lawful successor of earlier votes in the days of England’s greatest Kings. There is of course one all important difference between the two cases. The contributions levied by Charles were levied by an usurping stretch of the royal prerogative; the contributions levied by Ælfred, Eadgar, and Æthelred were granted, in due form of law, by the Great Council of the nation. But the impost was the same, though the authority by which it was raised was lawful in the one case and unlawful in the other. The earlier writs of ship-money under Charles demanded actual ships, just as in the case before us. And there was a call for special heed to the fleet in the days of Charles, just as much as there was in the days of Æthelred. To say nothing of the general complications of Europe, the Algerine corsairs, though not quite so formidable as Swegen’s Danes, did serious damage to English commerce, and they sometimes actually landed and plundered on the English and Irish coasts. The objection was to the illegal shape in which the demand came. And the later writs, which, under pretence of a composition for the actual ships, levied a tax by royal authority over the whole country, were a further abuse. Money came into the King’s clutches, not only without any lawful right, but without any kind of guaranty that it would be applied to the purposes for which it professed to be raised. This was the very evil against which the ancient mode of contributions in kind effectually guarded.

Besides these vigorous preparations at home, there seems some reason to believe that an attempt was made at this time to strengthen England by foreign help. It was plainly felt that the peace bought from the Danes had secured only a breathing-space, that their attacks would soon begin again, and that it was necessary to employ the blessed interval in obtaining support from every possible quarter. It was not unnatural to hope that the marriage of Emma had gained for England a continental ally, and we are told, on secondary but not contemptible authority, that Æthelred now sent to his brother-in-law Duke Richard, asking for both help and counsel.^[660] There is nothing unlikely in the statement; but, whatever may have been given by Richard in the way of counsel, it does not appear |No Norman help given.| that a single Norman ship or Norman soldier was sent to the help of England. Hugh, the betrayer of Exeter, is the only recorded contribution which either Norman chivalry or Norman churlhood made to the defence of our shores against the Dane. Nor indeed was there any strong reason why Richard should help his brother-in-law, unless he had taken up the cause as a kind of crusade, and had stepped in as a Christian champion against the heathen invaders. But Richard and his subjects were Normans before they were Christians, and all the traditions of Norman policy tended to fraternization with their Danish kinsmen. Such fraternization with the Danes had already caused, certainly a dispute, perhaps an open war, with England. Richard the Good in no way departed from this traditional policy. |Richard’s treaty with Swegen.| According to a Norman account, told with great confusion as to time, Richard was, either now or a few years later, actually bound by a treaty with Swegen, not only to receive sick and wounded Danes in his dominions, but to allow the spoils of England to be sold in the Norman ports.^[661] This was the old ground of quarrel, but Æthelred was just now not likely to retaliate by another invasion of the Côtentin. And, according to another story, told with equal confusion as to dates, Richard, like his father, did not scruple to accept the help of two heathen Kings of the North in his warfare with his Christian neighbours.^[662] At a later time indeed he could not well refuse shelter in his dominions to his sister with her husband and children; |Richard keeps aloof from English affairs.| but anything like even an attempt at active interference in English affairs on the part of Normandy was delayed till the reign of his son Robert.

At last the great fleet was gathered together at Sandwich. So great a fleet had never been seen in the reign of any King. No man living had seen such an one, nor was such an one spoken of in any book. There the ships were, enough and ready to guard the land against any foe.^[663] And, under Ælfred or Æthelstan, we may be sure that those ships would have kept the seas clear from every foe, or else they would have met the invaders face to face on their own element. But in the reign of Æthelred domestic treason ruined everything. The fleet raised by such unparalleled efforts was doomed to do no more for England than any other preparations which had been made during this miserable reign. The fleet was ready, but there was discord among the commanders. Eadric, in his own rise, had raised along with himself several of his brothers,^[664] of one of whom, Brihtric, we read a character quite as bad |Affair of Wulfnoth and Brihtric.| as of Eadric himself. This man, at this time or a little earlier, brought unjust charges to the King, of what kind we are not told, against a leader named Wulfnoth, described as “Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon.”^[665] Orders were given to seize Wulfnoth; he fled, and persuaded the crews of twenty ships, most likely the contingent of his own shire, to flee with him. They presently began to plunder the whole south coast. Brihtric then followed him with eighty ships, thinking to win great fame,^[666] and to bring back Wulfnoth alive or dead. But a violent storm, such as had never before been known, beat his ships to pieces, and dashed them against the shore, where presently Wulfnoth |Brihtric’s ships burned by Wulfnoth.| came and burned them. A hundred ships were thus lost in one way or another; but these must have been only a small portion of so great an armament. Yet an unaccountable |Utter dispersion of the fleet.| panic seized on all men. In the emphatic words of the Chronicles, “When this was known to the other ships where the King was, how the others had fared, it was as if all were redeless; and the King gat him home, and the Ealdormen and the High-Witan, and forsook the ships thus lightly; and the folk then that were in the ships took the ships eft to London, and let all the nation’s toil thus lightly perish, and there was no victory the better that all Angle-kin had hoped for.”^[667]

The fleet was lost just when it was most needed. Æthelred, Wulfnoth, and Brihtric had, among them, |Renewed Danish invasion. 1009.| wrought the utter ruin of their country. As might have been looked for, and as evidently was looked for, the Danes, when they had spent their money, came again. First |Thurkill’s fleet.| came a fleet commanded by an Earl Thurcytel or Thurkill, who plays a great part in the history for about twelve years to come.^[668] In the month of August this detachment was followed by a still larger one, under the command of Heming and Eglaf.^[669] The treason of Wulfnoth had left neither fleet nor army to withstand them. The two fleets met at Sandwich, whither their crews marched to Canterbury |Canterbury and East-Kent buy peace.| and assaulted the city. But the citizens, in partnership with the men of East-Kent, bought them off with a payment of three thousand pounds. We may here, as before in East-Anglia,^[670] see the action of the local Witan, and in the distinct mention of the East-Kentish men^[671] we may see traces of the time when Kent had two Kings, as it even now has two Bishops.^[672] The Danes then went back to their ships; they sailed to their old quarters in Wight, and thence ravaged Sussex, Hampshire, and even Berkshire. Æthelred seems now to have plucked up a little heart; the spirit which had been kindled by the vigorous preparations of the last two years had not quite died away. He gathered an army from all England, and placed detachments |Efforts of Æthelred frustrated by Eadric.| at various points along the coast. At one time, when the Danes were returning, laden with booty, from one of their plundering expeditions, the King stopped their way with a large force, both Æthelred and his people having, so we are told, made up their minds to conquer or die.^[673] But, by one of those inexplicable treasons of which we have so many in this reign, Eadric dissuaded the King from the intended battle,^[674] and the Danes were allowed to |November 11, 1009.| go back to their ships unmolested. After Martinmas they took up their winter quarters in the Thames; they ravaged Essex and other parts on both sides of the river, and again |Vain attempts of the Danes on London.| made several assaults on London. But the old spirit of the city was as strong as ever; every attempt of the Danes was beaten off, to the great loss of the assailants, by the citizens themselves, seemingly without any further help. |January, 1010.| After Christmas they set out again, and plunged yet further into the heart of the country than they had ever |Oxford burned.| ventured before. They crossed the Chiltern hills, reached Oxford, and burned the town. They then turned back, as if intending another attack on London. They went on in two divisions, plundering on both sides of the Thames. But hearing that a force was gathered against them in London, the northern division crossed the river at Staines. They then marched through Surrey back to their ships, and passed Lent in repairing them.^[675]

In each of these campaigns, if plundering expeditions in which no resistance is met with can be called campaigns, the ravages of the Danes become wider and more fearful, spreading every year over some portion of the land which had hitherto remained untouched. And, in the same proportion, the spirit of the English and their power of resistance |Last year of resistance.| seem to die away. We have now reached a year even more frightful than any that went before it, a year which seems to have finally crushed England. It is in this year that we meet with the last resistance that was offered to the invaders during this stage of the war. It was not till four years later, when it was too late, that the national spirit again awoke after the flight and return of |April, 1010.| Æthelred. After Easter the Danish fleet sailed forth, and this time it attacked East-Anglia. They landed near |Ulfeytel’s second battle, at Ringmere, May 18.| Ipswich, at a place called Ringmere. But there a hero was waiting for them. In this reign however a hero was commonly accompanied by a traitor to thwart his efforts. This time Ulfeytel was not taken by surprise; he stood |The battle lost by the treachery of Thurcytel.| ready for them with the whole force of East-Anglia. The battle began, and was for a while doubtful; but before long a Thegn of Danish descent, Thurcytel, surnamed Marehead, set the example of flight, which was followed by the whole army, save only the men of Cambridgeshire, who stood their ground and fought valiantly to the last.^[676] The slaughter was great, and, as usual, it fell heavily on the chief men, that is doubtless mainly on the comitatus of Ulfcytel. There died Æthelstan, a son-in-law of the King,^[677] the noble Thegn Oswig and his son, and Eadwig or Eadwine |[1002.]| the brother of Eafic, whose murder was recorded eight years before.^[678] There too died Wulfric the son of Leofwine a man of the stamp of Brihtnoth, at once bountiful to ecclesiastical foundations and true to his country in the |[1004.]| day of battle.^[679] Through his bounty the great monastery of Burton had been called into being six years earlier. But it is more to our purpose to note that, on the field of Ringmere, Wulfric, in noble contrast to the spirit which was so rife throughout the land, must have come as a volunteer, defending a part of the country which was not his immediate home. According to some accounts, he held the rank of Ealdorman in one of the shires of north-western Mercia, and among his vast possessions, scattered over a large part of Mercia and southern Northumberland, we find none that could have given him any special personal interest in East-Anglian warfare. The Danes kept possession of the battle-field; they harried all East-Anglia for three weeks; they burned Thetford and Cambridge, and then, partly on horseback and partly in their ships, returned to the Thames. This second burning of |[1004.]| Thetford, a town which had already been once burned six years before, shows, like so many other cases in these wars, the ease with which, when houses were almost wholly built of wood, a town was destroyed and again rebuilt. |Further ravages.| After a few days they set out again, ravaged Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, where they had been before, and the districts, hitherto seemingly untouched, of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. The state of things which now followed cannot be so well described as in the words of |State of the country as described by the Chroniclers.| the Chronicles. “And when they were gone to their ships, then should the force go out eft against them if they should land; then went the force home, and when they were east, then man^[680] held the force west, and when they were at the south, then was our force at the north. Then bade man all the Witan to the King, and man then should rede how man should guard this land. And though man somewhat red, that stood not so much as one month. And next was there no headman^[681] that force would gather, and ilk fled as he most might, and next would no shire so much as help other.”^[682] A state of things like this, where the utter corruption of the general government paralyses all national action, gives every encouragement to local and personal selfishness. Such selfishness is at all times rife enough in the ordinary mind. In times of any local pestilence or other misfortune, the districts which are exempt are often inclined to hug themselves in their supposed safety, to be unwilling to take any active exertion for the relief of others, or even to take the needful precautions for their own defence. And, in the times of which we speak, war of all kinds, a Danish invasion, a border war with the Welsh or the Scots, was a scourge at least not more out of the common way than a visitation of cholera or cattle-plague is now. That the Danes should be somewhere in the land had begun to be taken for granted. Each district had thus learned to think only of its own momentary safety, and to be careless about everything else. And this would be especially the case in a country, like England at that time, where the different parts of the kingdom were still very imperfectly welded together, where the habit of common action was still new and needed the strong arm of an able King thoroughly to enforce it. Even in this wretched year we may mark three stages of degradation. The first expedition met with real resistance, resistance which, had not Ulfcytel and Wulfric been betrayed by Thurcytel, would probably have been successful. In the second stage, though it does not appear that a blow was struck after the battle of Ringmere, yet there was at least the show of calling out troops against the enemy. But before the year was out we hear of a third Danish expedition, to which it would seem that not the least shadow of resistance was offered. At the end of November the enemy set forth again. They now struck deep into the heart of the country, going much further from their own element |Northampton burned. November, 1010.| than they had ever been before. They marched to Northampton, burned the town, and ravaged the neighbourhood. They then struck southwards, ravaged Wiltshire, and by midwinter they came back to their |Extent of the ravages up to this time.| ships, burning everywhere as they went. Sixteen shires—our authorities stop to reckon them up^[683]—had now been ravaged with fire and sword. Northumberland and the western and northern shires of Mercia were still untouched; and the western part of Wessex, which had suffered severely in former years, seems to have seen no |[1003.]| enemy since Swegen’s march from Exeter to Salisbury. But the shires of East-Anglia (seemingly reckoned as one only), Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bedford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Northampton, Kent, Surrey, Sussex,^[684] Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Berkshire, had all been more or less harried by the terrible Thurkill. The spirit of the nation was now crushed, and its means of defence were utterly exhausted.

The Witan met early in the next year. All notion of resistance seems to have been given up, but another attempt was made to buy off the enemy.^[685] An embassy was sent to the Danes, and another peace was patched up. The price was, of course, again raised, and it now reached forty-eight thousand pounds. But such a sum was not at once forthcoming, and it was not actually paid for a full year. This negotiation seems not to have gained for the country even that temporary repose which had been gained by earlier payments; the delay of payment may even have provoked the enemy to fresh ravages. At all events, we read that they went on harrying the land just as before. And the Chronicles may well say that all these evils came upon the land through lack of counsel,^[686] when we find how Æthelred and Eadric employed any momentary respite that the nominal |[1000.]| peace may have given them. It is the old story of eleven years before, when Æthelred wasted such time and strength as he had left in a needless, and probably unjust, attack |Eadric invades Wales, and ravages Saint David’s. 1011.| upon his Cumbrian vassal. So now Eadric and his master picked out this time, of all others, for an expedition into Wales. We are not told what special offence the Welsh princes had given just at this moment. Border skirmishes were no doubt always going on along the Mercian frontier; but the present expedition was clearly something much more serious, and it must have had a special cause. It is a highly probable conjecture^[687] that, just as in the case of Malcolm, the wrath of the English over-lord was aroused by a refusal on the part of the Welsh princes to contribute to the Danegeld. The expedition, at all events, made a deep impression on the Welsh, as it is the only warfare with England which their national chroniclers think worthy of record for many years before and afterwards.^[688] An English army entered South Wales, under the command of Eadric, who, as Ealdorman of the Mercians, would be the natural commander. With him was joined in command another Englishman, whose name is too hopelessly disfigured in the Welsh accounts to be recovered.^[689] They marched through the whole of South Wales, as far as that remote bishopric whither Saint David had fled from the face of man. There they plundered whatever rude forerunners already stood on the site of the most striking group of buildings in Britain. A force which was able to accomplish such a march must have been equally able to do some real service against the Danes; but against them not a blow seems to have been struck.

But later in the year, in September, a fearful blow indeed was struck on the other side. Perhaps it was not more fearful, there is some reason to believe that it was in itself less so, than some other events of this dreadful war; but it is clothed with special importance on account |Siege and capture of Canterbury. Sept. 8–29, 1011.| of the rank and character of a single sufferer. The Danes now again besieged Canterbury,^[690] and on the twentieth day the city was betrayed to them by a traitorous churchman, one Ælfmær, whose life had been saved by Archbishop Ælfheah on some unrecorded occasion. The Danes seem on this occasion to have been in an unusually merciful mood. This was most likely owing to the influence of Thurkill, who, if he had not already embraced Christianity, certainly did so soon afterwards. The most authentic accounts distinctly exclude any general massacre, though the later narratives give us a harrowing picture of slaughter and torture, worked in doubtless from the stock accounts of Danish barbarities elsewhere. That the metropolitan church was sacked and burned is a matter of course for which we hardly need any evidence. The number of captives was untold; the rich would doubtless be ransomed, and the rest sold for slaves. Ælfmær, the Abbot of Saint Augustine’s, was, for some unexplained reason, allowed to escape. But Ælfweard the King’s reeve, Leofrune, Abbess of Saint Mildthryth’s monastery in Canterbury, and Godwine, Bishop of Rochester,^[691] were all carried |Captivity of Archbishop Ælfheah.| away. And with them was another captive, whose name has made the capture of Canterbury to stand out more conspicuously than most of the events of this age, Ælfheah, Primate of all England.

Ælfheah was a man of noble birth, who, according to the standard of piety recognized by his age, had early in life forsaken, not only his paternal estate, but his widowed mother, in order to become a monk. At Deerhurst, at Bath, perhaps at Glastonbury, he strove after all monastic perfection. According to some reports, he was first Prior of one of the two great monasteries of Somerset, and afterwards |Bishop of Winchester, 984.| Abbot of the other.^[692] But it is more certain that he was advanced to the bishopric of Winchester, by the special favour of Dunstan, at a comparatively early age. |Archbishop of Canterbury, 1009.| A few years before the present time he had, as we have seen, been raised to the metropolitan throne. The Archbishop was now led away captive by the Danes. According to the most trustworthy account, he at first promised them a ransom,^[693] in expectation of which they kept him seven months in their ships. Meanwhile, not only the ransom of Ælfheah, but the general ransom of all England remained unpaid. The forty-eight thousand pounds, the price of the pretended peace, was still |Witenagemót at London, Easter (April 13), 1012.| owing. To settle this debt, Ealdorman Eadric—the King is not named—and the other Witan met in full Gemót. The Danes meanwhile lay in the Thames near Greenwich. On the Saturday after Easter the Danes seem to have held some kind of festival, at which they got very drunk on wine lately brought from the south. This was no doubt one fruit of that commerce between the Danes and the Norman ports which Duke Richard and his people found so profitable. The Normans exchanged the wines of Aquitaine for the tribute-money or the slaves of England. The Danes in their drunkenness now called on Ælfheah for the payment of the promised ransom. He refused; he would pay nothing; he had sinned in promising to pay; |Murder of Ælfheah. April 19th, 1012.| no one should give anything for his life; he offered himself to them to deal with him as they pleased. They then dragged the Archbishop to their husting or place of assembly. Thurkill tried to save him, offering gold and silver, anything save his ship only, to save the holy man’s life. But the rest would not hearken, and they began to pelt the Archbishop with stones, logs of wood, and the bones and skulls of oxen,^[694] the remains of their late feast. At last one Thrim, whom Ælfheah had converted and whom he had confirmed the day before, moved by a feeling of pity, clave his head with his battle-axe. The conduct of the Danes both before and afterwards shows that this attack on the Archbishop was a mere sudden outbreak, caused half by drunkenness, half by wrath at the Archbishop’s failure to make the promised payment. Thurkill had not been able to save the Archbishop’s life, but it must have been owing to his influence, and to that of any other converts whom Ælflheah had made, that the body was allowed to be taken to London with all reverence. It was there received by two Bishops, Ælfhun of London and Eadnoth of Dorchester, and was buried in Saint Paul’s minster.

We shall read later in our story how the claim of Ælfheah |Was Ælfheah a Martyr?| to the title of martyr was afterwards disputed by his foreign successor Lanfranc. But the honours paid to the English Archbishop were strongly defended by the more generous Anselm, on the ground that, though Ælfheah did not die for any point of Christian belief, yet he died for Christian justice and charity, as refusing to plunder his people in order to obtain a ransom for himself.^[695] Ælfheah is not the only one in the list of our ancient martyrs whose technical claim to the honours of martyrdom may fairly be doubted. As in the case of the young King Eadward, the name was freely bestowed on any good man who died by an unrighteous death. According to the most trustworthy narrative, Ælfheah, however innocently, brought his death upon himself, by making a promise and then failing to perform it. Hagiographers have of course surrounded him with a halo of sanctity and miracle, and they have clearly exaggerated the evil deeds of his destroyers. But, putting all exaggerations aside, it is easy to see in Ælfheah a thoroughly good and Christian man, one of those men of simple, straightforward, benevolent, earnestness, of whom the English Church in that age produced many. He was undoubtedly a saint, and it seems hard to refuse him the title of martyr. He had at least as good a right to it as many martyrs of earlier times, who brought on themselves a death which they might have avoided by provoking or challenging their heathen enemies.

Soon after the Archbishop’s murder, the forty-eight thousand pounds, the ransom of England, was paid, oaths |Thurkill enters the English service. 1012.| were sworn, and the Danish fleet dispersed. But Thurkill, whose whole conduct had shown a distinct leaning to Christianity, now entered the English service.^[696] As we afterwards find him a zealous Christian, he was doubtless baptized now, if he had not been already baptized by Ælfheah. He brought with him forty-five ships, the crews of which were to receive food and clothing from the King, and they engaged in return to defend England against every enemy.

Thurkill is a character of much interest, as he in many points resembles, on a smaller scale, his wonderful countryman Cnut. He came to England on an errand of destruction, and he was gradually won over to be the stoutest defender of the land which he came to ravage. He was not a mere Pallig,^[697] to accept English wealth and honours, and then to go over to the enemy at the first opportunity. When he swore oaths to Æthelred, he honestly devoted himself to the master whose bread he ate. He fought valiantly for England, and his ships for a while were the only refuge where the native King of the English could find shelter. If we find him at a later time once more on the Danish side, it was probably not till death had set him free from all personal ties to his first master, certainly not till English Ealdormen had set him the example of acknowledging the foreign King.