Eddisbury. 43 



admirable lady, Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred, and 

 widow of Ethelred, king of Mercia, sought to establish 

 herself in positions of great strength, her feminine 

 sagacity at once pointed to Eddisbury as impregnable. 

 Ethelfleda, says the old chronicler, was " the wisest lady in 

 England, an heroic princess; she might have been called 

 a king rather than a lady or a queen. King Edward, 

 her brother, governed his life, in his best actions, by her 

 counsels." We have admirable women of our own living 

 among us women in every sense queenly by nature : 

 let us never forget, in our gratitude to God for the gift of 

 them, that in the past there were prototypes of the best. 

 Continued in her rule, by acclamation, after the death of 

 her husband, Ethelfleda, "the lady of the Mercians," 

 reigned for eight years. Rather more than eleven acres 

 of the green mound we are now speaking of were 

 defensively enclosed by her, partly with palings, partly with 

 earthworks, traces of which remain to this day. Frail 

 and perishable in its materials, the "city of Eddisbury," 

 as historians call this once glorious though simple settle- 

 ment, in the very nature of things could not last. A 

 good river, essential to the prosperity of an inland town, 

 it did not possess. After the death, moreover, of Ethel- 

 fleda, who went to her rest in 920, the subsidence of the 

 Danish invasions reduced the importance of such for- 

 tresses, and so, by slow degrees, the famous old "city" 

 disappeared. The name of Eddisbury occurs, it is true, 

 in Domesday Book, but apparently as a name and 

 nothing besides. Places like Eddisbury are to England 



