Emboldened by this victory the Danes again sped westward, possibly intending to harry Somerset and Wiltshire, and occupied Aescesdune, which Asser translates “the hill of the ash,”[132] and which has been generally identified with what are now known as the Downs or as Ashdown Hills. These are a chalk ridge some 600 or 700 feet in height, which runs for about ten miles east and west through the northern part of Berkshire and divides the valley of the Thames from that of the Kennet. The Saxons marched after the enemy in haste and both nations arrayed themselves for battle. The Danes held the higher ground: the centre of their army being commanded by their two kings, Halfdene, brother of Inguar, and Bagseg; while the wings were under the command of the numerous jarls who followed their standard. On the Saxon side it was arranged that Ethelred should encounter the kings and Alfred the jarls. But when the heathens began to march down the hill, and the Saxons should have received the word to spring forward to meet them, that signal was not given from the royal tent. There knelt Ethelred, listening to Mass, and refusing to stir till the rite was ended. “He would not,” he said, “abandon the service of God for that of men.” On Alfred, therefore, rested the responsibility of assuming the chief command and leading the whole army to battle. It is probable, though not distinctly so stated by Asser, that Ethelred, against whose personal courage no imputation is made, soon emerged from his tent and hastened after his fighting “fyrd” men. A single stunted thorn-tree, still standing apparently when Asser wrote, marked the spot where the clash of the opposing armies was deadliest and where the battle-shouts were heard the loudest. Long and desperate was the encounter, but at last, near night-fall, the Saxons prevailed and the heathens fled in utter confusion, leaving dead on the field Bagseg, the king, five jarls and many thousands of the rank and file, whose bodies covered the whole broad ridge of Ashdown.

It was a great victory, certainly, but like so many other battles in this strange campaign it was utterly indecisive. The Danes who had succeeded in reaching their stronghold, now marched southward, apparently threatening Winchester: Ethelred and Alfred followed them, and after another tough fight were defeated at Basing, near to the site of that far-famed “Loyalty House” which eight centuries later was held so gallantly and so long by the Marquis of Winchester for Charles I. against the army of the Parliament. The Danish victory at Basing, however, was, as we are expressly told, “a victory without spoils”. The invaders seem to have renounced their intended attack on Winchester and turned back to their entrenched camp at Reading. Two months pass, during which some of the nameless battles that bring the tale of this year’s conflicts up to nine, may have been fought. When the veil again lifts we find the Danes apparently attempting to turn the English left, marching the whole length of Berkshire to Hungerford, and seeking to penetrate into Wiltshire. The next battle was fought on the edge of Savernake Forest; Ethelred and Alfred each put their enemies to flight, “and far into the day they had the victory,” but after many had fallen on either side, the Danes held the field of slaughter. The chronicler’s entry is extremely enigmatical, and we are perhaps allowed to conjecture that in the moment of victory Ethelred received a mortal wound which changed the fortunes of the day, for our next entry is as follows: “And the Easter after King Ethelred died, having reigned five years, and his body lieth at Wimborne”. As we are told at the same time that “a mickle summer army came to Reading,” we may consider that two events stand out clearly in these April days of 871, the arrival from over-seas of a great fresh body of troops, who had not wintered in England, to reinforce their countrymen at Reading; and the death of King Ethelred, whose body was not taken to be buried in his own city of Winchester, but, probably owing to the disturbed state of the country, had to be interred in the nearer minster of Wimborne in Dorsetshire. There his epitaph (not contemporary) records that he died “by the hands of the pagans”.

The accession of Alfred to the throne, in 871, on his brother’s death, seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the deadly earnestness of the great encounter. There were battles at Reading and at Wilton, in which, as usual, the Saxons seemed to be on the point of winning when the Danes, turning at the right moment on their disorderly pursuers, changed defeat into victory, and kept possession of the battle-field. They were, however, by this time as much wearied and wasted by the events of this awful year as the Saxons themselves, with whom they now made peace, a peace which, as the historian remarks with surprise, they kept for four years unbroken.

During these years, however, from 872 to 875, they were greatly strengthening their hold on the northern kingdoms. After besieging London and putting it to a heavy ransom, they marched through Mercia, occupied successively Torksey on the Trent and Repton in Derbyshire, dethroned Alfred’s brother-in-law, Burhred (874), and set up in his stead “a foolish thegn named Ceolwulf,” who bound himself by oaths and hostages to hand Mercia back to his new lords whenever they should demand it. Burhred, heart-weary of the strife and the toil of his twenty-two years of reigning, went to the paradise of Anglo-Saxons, Rome, died there and was buried in the new church of St. Mary which Pope Leo IV. had built in the precincts of the Saxon school.

In the next year, 875, while part of the Danish force went to Cambridge and took up their quarters there, a vigorous detachment, headed by the fierce Halfdene, crossed the Tyne and invaded Bernicia, whose inhabitants had driven out a puppet-king named Egbert, reigning there as vassal of the Danes. This spasmodic stroke for liberty was cruelly avenged by the ravage of the till then unharried province. It was probably at this time that the Christian civilisation of Northumbria, such as we find it in the pages of Bede, received its death-stroke. Under the leadership of Halfdene, as Symeon of Durham informs us, the Danish army indulged in a wild revel of cruelty, first mocking and then slaying the servants and handmaidens of God, and in short spreading murder and conflagration from the eastern to the western sea. The devastation was not confined to the Anglian kingdom; the Picts on the north and the Britons of Strathclyde on the north-west shared in the general ruin.

This invasion of Halfdene’s set in motion a pilgrimage which was full of significance for the ecclesiastical history of Northumbria, the memorable migration of the body of Saint Cuthbert. Now, at last, under the terror of the pagan hosts, the little isle of Lindisfarne, which for 240 years had been the spiritual capital of Bernicia, relapsed into its pristine loneliness. Seeing the widespread ravage wrought by the heathen men, bishop Eardulf resolved on flight, but could not bear to leave behind the uncorrupted body of the patron saint. He called into council Edred, abbot of St. Cuthbert’s monastery at Carlisle, who reminded him of the saint’s own words: “Dig ye up my bones and find a home elsewhere as God may direct you, rather than consent to the iniquity of the schismatics”. St. Cuthbert’s forebodings perhaps pointed to a recrudescence of the Easter controversy, but the churchmen rightly held that they were applicable to the far more terrible invasion of the Danes. Accordingly they took up the body of the saint (still incorrupt, according to the legend): they took also its companion relics, the head of St. Oswald, some bones of St. Aidan and of the three bishops who followed him; and provided with these precious talismans they set forth on their first great pilgrimage. For eight years they wandered: at first like sheep over the moors of Northumbria; then they came down to the western coast at Workington, and were on the point of setting sail for Ireland when a wind which sprang up, as if by miracle, drove them back upon the shore. In the hurry of the abortive embarkation they dropped into the sea the precious and beautifully illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, but miraculously recovered the treasure after many days. This manuscript is still preserved in the British Museum, showing stains as if of sea-water on its pages.

At last, in 883, five years after the peace which will mark the conclusion of this chapter, the uncorrupted body and its weary guardians found rest at the old Roman station of Chester-le-Street, eight miles south of Newcastle, under the shelter of the rule of a converted Dane, Guthred, son of Harthacnut. “He gave them,” says the chronicler, “all the land between Wear and Tyne for a perpetual possession, and ordained that the church which they were about to build should be constituted a sanctuary, that whosoever for any cause should flee to the saint’s body should have respite for thirty-seven days from his pursuers.” Such were the magnificent possessions and privileges bestowed on the minster which now rose at Chester-le-Street by the old Roman highway, and which, after a little more than a century, were to be transferred in 995 to the more famous sanctuary at Durham.

The year 876 marked the end of the truce and the renewal of the Danish attacks on Wessex. Three Danish kings, one of whom was the famous Guthrum, after wintering in Cambridge, stole past the West Saxon fyrd, and apparently by a series of night marches succeeded in reaching Wareham. Here, surrounded by the rivers Piddle and Frome, they could feel themselves as secure as in the islands of Thanet or Sheppey. Worsted, however, by blockade rather than by battle, the Danish kings came to terms with Alfred. They gave hostages once more of their most honourable men and swore upon a certain sacred armlet—an oath, says the chronicler, which they had never given to any other people—that they would truly depart out of the kingdom. Not all of “the army,” however, kept this solemn compact. Hostages and oath notwithstanding, the mounted men rode off to Exeter and entrenched themselves there. King Alfred’s pursuit with the infantry of the fyrd was vain. Fortunately, however, the fleet which should have co-operated with the Danes was overtaken by a fierce storm, and 120 ships filled with warriors were dashed to pieces on the rocks of Purbeck. Disheartened by this calamity, the Northmen at Exeter once more swore great oaths, gave hostages and marched forth from Wessex to their own now vassal kingdom of Mercia.

This happened in the autumn of 877. Soon after Twelfth night, at the beginning of 878, another gang of plunderers came suddenly to the “royal villa” of Chippenham, probably hoping to capture the king himself. With a small band of followers Alfred escaped to the woods and morasses of Athelney in Somerset; but though they thus missed their chief prize, this invasion of Wessex, for some reason unknown to us, came nearer to success than any which had preceded it. From Chippenham as a centre the Danes harried the country far and wide; they drove many of the inhabitants across the sea; those who remained had to accept them as their lords; it seemed as if Wessex would have to follow the example of Mercia and Northumbria, and bow its neck to the Danish yoke. Meanwhile Alfred, in the little island of Athelney—an island then, because surrounded on all sides by marshes, but an island now no longer—was gathering his faithful followers round him and quietly preparing for the recovery of his throne.[133] The little band of his followers wrought at the construction of a rude fortress, which was finished by Easter, and which proved impregnable by the heathen assailants. Behind this earthwork the West Saxon king “greatly stood at bay,” and from hence he and the men of the Somerset fyrd, who gathered round him under their ealdorman Ethelnoth, made several successful sallies against the enemy.

Ere long there came to cheer them the tidings of a great victory gained by the men of Devon, near Bideford Bay, over a Danish army which seems to have been commanded by Ubba, the murderer of St. Edmund. After wintering in South Wales, Ubba had crossed the Bristol Channel, landed in Devonshire and besieged the soldiers of the fyrd in a poorly fortified stronghold which they had constructed and which was called Cynuit.[134] The fort had no spring of water near it, and the victory of the invaders seemed assured, but despair gave courage to the besieged, who sallied forth at dawn, took the besiegers by surprise, and slew of them eight hundred. Only a scanty remnant escaped to their ships; the great raven standard, the flapping of whose wings betokened victory, was taken, and Ubba himself was among the slain. The death of the royal martyr of East Anglia was thus at length avenged.