and city rose, and murdered all the Danes
who were their neighbours. Young and old,
babies and soldiers, men and women, every
Dane was killed. No doubt there were
among them many ferocious men who had
done the English great wrong, and whose
pride and insolence in swaggering in the
houses of the English, and insulting their
wives and daughters, had become unbearable;
but, no doubt there were also among them
many peaceful Christian Danes who had
married English women and become like
English men. They were all slain, even to
GUNHILDA, the sister of the King of
Denmark, married to an English lord; who was
first obliged to see the murder of her husband
and her child, and then was killed herself.

When the King of the sea-kings heard of
this deed of blood, he swore that he would
have a great revenge. He raised an army, and a
mightier fleet of ships than ever yet had sailed
to England; and in all his army there was
not a slave or an old man, but every soldier
was a free man, and the son of a free man, and
in the prime of life, and sworn to be revenged
upon the English nation, for the massacre of
that dread thirteenth of November, when his
countrymen and countrywomen and the little
children whom they loved, were killed with
fire and sword. And so, the sea-kings came
to England in many great ships, each bearing
the flag of its own commander. Golden
eagles, ravens, dragons, dolphins, beasts of
prey, threatened England from the prows of
these ships, as they came onward through the
water: and were reflected in the shining shields
that hung upon the insides. The ship that bore
the standard of the King of the sea-kings was
carved and painted like a mighty serpent;
and the King in his anger prayed that the
Gods in whom he trusted, might all desert
him, if his serpent did not strike its fangs in
England's heart.

And indeed it did. For, the great army
landing from the great fleet, near Exeter, went
forward, laying England waste, and striking
their lances in the earth as they advanced,
or throwing them into rivers, in token of their
making all the island theirs. In remembrance
of the black November night when the Danes
were murdered; wheresoever the invaders
came, they made the Saxons prepare and
spread for them great feasts; and when they
had eaten those feasts, and had drunk a
curse to England, with wild rejoicings, they
drew their swords, and killed their Saxon
entertainers, and marched on. For six long years
they carried on this war; burning the crops,
farmhouses, barns, mills, granaries; killing
the laborers in the fields; preventing the seed
from being sown in the ground; causing
famine and starvation; and leaving only
heaps of ruin and smoking ashes, where they
had found rich towns. To crown this misery,
English officers and men deserted, and even the
favorites of Ethelred the Unready, becoming
traitors, seized many of the English ships,
turned pirates against their own country, and,
aided by a storm, occasioned the loss of
nearly the whole English navy. There was
but one man of note, at this miserable pass,
who was true to his country and the feeble
king. He was a priest, and a brave one.
For twenty days, the Archbishop of Canterbury
defended that city against its Danish
besiegers; and, when a traitor in the town
threw the gates open and admitted them, he
said, in chains, "I will not buy my life with
money that must be extorted from this suffering
people. Do with me as you please!"
Again and again, he steadily refused to
purchase his release with gold wrung from
the poor. At last, the Danes being tired of
this, and being assembled at a drunken merry-
making, had him brought into the feasting-hall.
"Now, bishop," they said, "we want gold!"
He looked round on the crowd of angry
faces: from the shaggy beards close to him,
to the shaggy beards against the walls, where
men were mounted on tables and forms to
see him over the heads of others: and knew
that his time was come. "I have no gold,"
said he. "Get it, bishop!" they all thundered.
"That, I have often told you I will not,"
said he. They gathered closer round him,
threatening, but he stood unmoved. Then,
one man struck him; then, another; then,
a cursing soldier picked up from a heap in a
corner of the hall, where fragments had been
rudely thrown at dinner, a great ox-bone,
and cast it at his face, from which the blood
came spurting forth; then, others ran to the
same heap, and knocked him down with other
bones, and bruised and battered him; until
one soldier, whom he had baptised, (willing,
as I hope for the sake of that soldier's soul,
to shorten the sufferings of the good man)
struck him dead with his battle-axe.

If Ethelred had had the heart to emulate
the courage of this noble archbishop, he
might have done something yet. But, he
paid the Danes forty-eight thousand pounds,
instead, and gained so little by the cowardly
act, that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to
subdue all England. So broken was the
attachment of the English people, by this
time, to their incapable king and their forlorn
country, which could not protect them, that
they welcomed Sweyn on all sides, as a
deliverer. London faithfully stood out, as long as
the king was within its walls, but, when he
sneaked away, it also welcomed the Dane.
Then, all was over; and the king took refuge
abroad with the Duke of Normandy, who had
already given shelter to the king's wife, once the
Flower of that country, and to her children.

Still, the English people, in spite of their
sad sufferings, could not quite forget the great
King Alfred and the Saxon race. When
Sweyn died suddenly, in little more than a
month after he had been proclaimed King of
England, they generously sent to Ethelred,
to say that they would have him for their
king again, "if he would only govern them