in ALFRF.D. 



told by Acr be engaged six of the ships of the pagaae at sea, and took 

 on. of thceB. the others making their escape. This seem, to have brought 

 them down again upon Wewrx. The nut year, issuing from Uivir 

 winter qnarurs at Cambridge (GranUbrycge) by night, a powerful 

 body of them. Uking to sea and sailing along the sonth coast, sur- 

 prised UM tilth of Wareham in Dorsetshire, and Alfred was obliged 

 to bribe them by a sum of money to leave his domiuiona They did 

 ot however keep their oaths, though be had sworn them both in the 

 pagan and UM Christian fashion, but soon after, attacking him in the 

 iljfca, they slew all his cavalry, and seising the horses, rode away on 

 them to Exeter, where they settled for the winter. Encouraged by 

 his late naval .nooses, Alfred ordered boats and galleys to be built 

 la different ports, and manning them. Asser tclb) us, with pirates, 

 ctetimisil them to guard the sea, while, in the spring of 877, he 



at the bead of a land force to Exeter, to expel the intruders. 

 to Asser, the fleet attacked 120 chips of the Danes which 

 to the eesertsncc of their countrymen, and drove them 



, . _sn all on board perished ; but it does not appear that the 

 . king ventured to besiege those who had taken possession of 



; all that is stated is, that another treaty was concluded, and 



mtrther promise given by them on oath that they would coon take 

 thrfr departure ; and in fact in the month of August they removed 

 into MrrcU. But they returned in the beginning of the next year, 

 878, in augmented numbers ; and now they appear to have met with 

 BO iie'l.nr<i Marching to Chippenbam, they took possession of that 

 royal town, and making it their head-quarters, cent out thence they: 

 marauding bands over all the surrounding country. Of the natives 

 come fled beyond seas ; those who remained behind universally sub- 

 mitted to the invaders, and Alfred himself, at first attended only by a 

 lew of hie nobility and soldiers, afterwards without any followers, 

 wandered about in the woods and marshes, till at last be found what 

 proved a secure hiding-place in the hut of a poor peasant, who with 

 his wife tended a few cows on a small elevated piece of ground rising 

 among the marshes on the north bank of the Tone in Somersetshire, 

 end still known by the name of Athelney; that in, Atheling-Eye, 

 meaning the island of the nobles, or the royal island. He is said to 

 have represented himself to the cowherd as one of the king's thanes, 

 ccccpsil from a rout of bis countrymen. 



Statement* are found in various old writers which distinctly impute 

 to Alfred up to this time of his life a character and conduct in some 

 respects very different from what he afterwards displayed. Mr. Sharon 

 Turner, who was the first among the modern biographers of Alfred to 

 notice this circumstance, has, in bis ' History of the Anglo-Saxons,' 

 collected and exhibited the concurring testimonies in question with 

 diligence and clearness, and with a good sense and right feeling, very 

 unlike the spirit in which his discoveries have been seized upon, and 

 absurdly produced as a proof that all the so-called greatness of the 

 Anglo-Saxon king is the mere creation of modern ignorance and 

 bombast. It is conjectured by Mr. Turner that the facility with 

 which the Danes appear to have at hut obtained complete possession 

 of Weesex may be accounted for on the supposition that Alfred 

 had lost the attachment of his subjects through his uiisgovernment 

 ead hi* immoralities; and he rests this upon the belief that Asser 

 says that be believed this adversity which befel the king happened 

 to him not undeservedly, " because," he goes on, " in the first part 

 of hie reign, when he was a young man, and governed by a youthful 

 mind, when the men of his kingdom and his subjects came to him and 

 besought his aid in their necessities, when they who were depressed 

 by the powerful implored his aid and patronage, he would not hear 

 them, nor afford them any assistance, but treated them as of no esti- 

 mation." This part of the proof may be set aside ; it having been 

 ascertained that the paseage is an interpolation of a later period. (See 

 Preface to ' Monuments HUtorica Britanoica.') The well-known story 

 of hie being scolded one day by the cowherd's wife for allowing some 

 loarra, or cakes, to burn which she bad left him to watch, is told in the 

 ancient Saxon and Latin Lives of St Neot, which are in the Cotton 

 Library. According to William of Malmesbury and other biter chro- 

 BieUrs, the cowherd, whose name was Denulf, having afterwards, on 

 Alfred' recommendation, applied himself to letters, was made by 

 him Bishop of Winchester, >nd was the same Denulf who died occupant 

 of that cec in 909. After some time Alfred appears to have discovered 

 himself to come of hie friends, or to have been discovered by them ; 

 end be wee also joined in his retreat by his wife, if another story be 

 true which is told by KUielward, Ingulfus, and Simeon of Durham, 

 about bis one day ordering their scanty store of breid to be divided 

 1o came hungry to the door, although they had no 



ALFRED. 



lit 



with a brggar who 



of a further supply ; an act of kind-heartedne 



which, as might be expected, the monkish narrators make to have been 

 forthwith bountifully recompensed by Heaven, beiides embellishing 

 rith uodry other miraculous circum.tances. It is cal- 



UM Incident wi 



I that Alfred remained at Athelney about five months; but 

 UM letter part of his time he had an armed body of his sub- 

 jeeto with him, and UM place bad been converted into a well-defended 

 from which incursions were frequently made into the 

 f country, the beeves end granaries of Dane or recreant 

 differently, we are told, to replenish the royal larder. 



, , . 



At bet Alfred resolved to attack their main army, which was encamped 

 CO c*4 erwmd Brattoo Hill, between Bddiogtoo and Westbury in Wilt- 



shire. Iliii principal adherents having gathered on his summons at n 

 place known by the name of Egbert's Stone in Selwood Forest, he led 

 his united forces to a hill at a short distance from that occupied by 

 the Danes, encamped n it for the night, and next morning conducted 

 them to the attack. Tho Northmen were defeated with great sin 

 and those who escaped were beleaguered in a neighbouring f . 

 place in which they had shut themselves up, and after a short time 

 were compelled to surrender at discretion. The romantic adventure, 

 mentioned by several of the old historians, of Alfred making bis way 

 into the Danish camp, and into the tent of the king, Qorin, Quthruu, 

 or Qodrun, in the disguise of a harper, is said to have happened the 

 day before this victory of Kddington, or Klhaudune, gained early iu 

 May 878, which restored him to hia throne, and compelled the 

 foreigners to quit Wossex without another blow. Godrun even 

 consented to Alfred's proposition that he and his followers should 

 become Christians ; he himself was baptised by the name of Athelstan, 

 Alfred standing as his godfather ; and it was thereupon agreed that 

 the converted Danes should occupy in peace the whole of the country 

 called East Anglia, including the modern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, 

 Cambridge, and perhaps Essex, with the small portions of Huntingdon, 

 Bedford, and Hertford, that might lie to the eastward of the old 

 Roman road called Watling-atreet. A formal treaty to that effect, the 

 terms of which have been preserved, was concluded between the two 

 parties. 



The effect of this arrangement was, that the Danes, no longer 

 regarded as foreigners, were established in the dominion of a consider- 

 able portion of England, and in the occupation of the country to a 

 much greater extent ; for the population both of the northern counties 

 constituting the kingdom, or the two kingdoms, of North uinbria, and 

 of the midland districts forming the kingdom of Mercia, waa also by 

 this time in great part Danish as well as that of East Auglia, The 

 only part of the country that remained purely Saxon waa the kingdom 

 of Wessex (with which Kent and Sussex had long been incorporated), 

 comprehending the region to the south of the Thames, or the modern 

 counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hants, Berks, Wilts, Dorset, Somerset, 

 Devon, and so much of Cornwall, as had been wrested from the Britons. 

 It has however been held by some that even iu East Auglia Alfred was 

 understood to have reserved to himself the supreme dominion ; and 

 it appears that, at least within a few years from this time, the whole 

 or nearly the whole of Mercia fell under his power, and was given by 

 him to be ruled by Ethelred, to whom he afterwards gave his daughter 

 Ethelfleda in marriage. In Northumbria also he exercised a predo- 

 minant influence ; and in 893, after the death of Quthred, whom he 

 had appointed king ten years before, he took the government of the 

 country into his own hands. Meanwhile Guthrun had continued to 

 reign in East Auglia till his death iu 890, when, according to the Danish 

 historians, he was succeeded by another prince of the same name ; but, 

 a few years after this kingdom also appears to have returned under the 

 sway of Alfred, who may therefore bo regarded as having been from 

 about the year 894 king of all England. In the interval between his 

 restoration to bis ancestral throne of Wessex and this date he had been 

 unremitting in his exertions both to re-establish order within his king- 

 dom, and to strengthen it against external enemies. Ingulfus states 

 that he divided it into hundreds and tithiugs, with a view both to 

 police and to military defence ; and that he not only restored the 

 cities and castles which had been destroyed or hod fallen into ruin 

 during the recent wars and confusions, but constructed additions 

 fortifications wherever they were required. He also engaged with 

 ardour in the building of ships, BO that he was in a few years master 

 of a respectable navy ; and, if wo may rely on the accounts of Asser, 

 the Saxon chronicler, and other ancient authorities Alfred may bo 

 regarded as the true founder of this great English arm of war. 

 In 894 a new invasion of Northmen, uuder a leader, Hastin. . 

 had already made his name terrible by various descents on the coast 

 and incursions into the heart of France, once more involved England 

 in a war, which was protracted over more than three yours, and in the 

 course of which nearly every part of the country, of the interior oa 

 well as of the coasts, waa at one time or other the scene of bloodshed 

 and devastation. The Northmen made their appearance in two fleets ; 

 one consisting of 250 vessels, which landed its armed multitude on 

 the south-west coast of Kent, near Uomuey Marsh ; the other of 

 80 ships, under the conduct of Hastings himself, who, leading them 

 up the Thames, and thence into the East Swale, disembarked his 

 forces at Milton, near Sittingbourue. Alfred immediately threw him- 

 self between the two armies; and when, after confining itself for 

 some time to its encampment, the one which had landed on the south 

 coast suddenly plunged into the interior, and attempted to cut across 

 the country and effect a junction with the other by a route to the 

 west of where he was stationed, he pursued and overtook it at Farn- 

 httin, in Surrey, where an engagement took place, which soon eiicli-.l in 

 the defeat and flight of the Danes. The pursuit was continued across 

 the Thames, and then across the whole of Essex, till the foreigners 

 took refuge in the small Isle of Mersey, at the mouth of the Coluc. 

 While Alfred lay blockading them here, an armament of a hundred 

 ships, fitted out by the revolted Danish colonists of Esat Anglia, 

 passed the North Foreland, and, sailing along the southern coast as 

 far as Exeter, attacked that city ; and another fleet of forty vessels, 

 which bad set sail from Northumbria, hod made its way round by 



