contest became more and more imminent. The CHAP. V. Elfred. 901 937. king's course was still a slow and cautious one. The House of He had cleared his eastern flank by the conquest of southern Essex, and secured his border-line in that quarter by the "burhs" at Witham and Hertford. But his warfare in the east had probably ended in a new frith with the East-Anglians; for after a rest of four years we find his advance directed not against East-Anglia, but against the Danes of Mid-Britain or the Five Boroughs. The nearest of their settle ments lay just northward of the valley of the Thames, in the upper valley of the Ouse. Here, in earlier days, the house of the Bokings had planted their "ham" of Buckingham on the little stream, and since the making of the Danelaw this "ham had been the southernmost of the Danish settlements in mid-Britain; with Bedford and Huntingdon in fact it formed a line of towns, each with its jarl and army, which held the valley of the Ouse. It was in the hands of Jarl Thurcytel" and his holds" when in 918 Eadward marched to attack it. A siege of four weeks made him its master; and here as elsewhere he built "burhs" on either side the river to guard its passage, as well as to bar any raid upon the valley of the Thames. The capture of the town, however, was followed by the submission of its jarl and its holds ; and the severity of the blow was shown by a like submission of" almost all the chief men that belonged to Bedford, and also many that belonged to Northampton." Their submission drew the king onward both 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 918. CHAP. V. Ælfred. 901937. Mid-Britain. to the eastward and to the north. In 919 he The House of marched along the Ouse through the flat meadows of Olney upon Bedford,' which offered no resistance, and which he guarded by a "burh" on the southern Conquest of bank of the stream. Two years later, in 921, he pushed forward on to the upland of Mid-Britain, and seized and fortified the site of the ruined Towcester. Meanwhile he was providing with his old caution against danger at either end of his long line by erecting fresh fortresses at Maldon in Essex, and at Wigmore in our Herefordshire. But cautious as his advance had been, its real import could no longer be disguised, and the seizure of Towcester roused the Danes of Mid-Britain into action. Not only the Danes of Northampton and of Leicester but the whole force of the Five Boroughs made a fierce onset on the burh at Towcester. Fierce as it was, however, it was beaten off by the new townsmen. Eadward hastened to secure the town, which must have been guarded as yet only by a trench and stockade, with a wall of stone; and the presence of his arms brought about the submission of Northampton, with Jarl Thurfrith and its host, as well as the district which obeyed it, a district which stretched as far as the Welland. Conquest of But while the king was thus pressing on the Five East Anglia. Boroughs, a far fiercer conflict was raging on his flank. The Danes of East-Anglia had sprung to arms even before their fellow Danes in central Britain; and in this quarter fighting had been going on through the whole year. Early in the spring the Danes of Hunt1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 919. 2 Ib. a. 921. 1 CHAP. V. Alfred. 901937 ingdon threw themselves fruitlessly on the new burh at Bedford; and then quitting Huntingdon set up The House of a fresh encampment at Tempsford, where they were soon attacked by the English fyrd of the neighbouring districts. The capture of Tempsford, with its king, jarls, and warriors, gave fresh heart to the assailants; and a force of Englishmen drew together from Kent, Surrey, and Essex for the siege of Colchester. Their success was again complete; the town was stormed, and its defenders slain; while a counter raid of the Danes upon Maldon ended in the utter rout of the pirates. It was at this moment that the completion of the walls of Towcester and the submission of Northampton set Eadward free to act in the east. His first blow was at the district about the Fens. A few miles march over the flat Ouse-country brought him to the spot where the English village of Godmanchester was rising by the ruins of the Roman Durolipons on the road that skirted the Wash. On a rise across the river which was then the "Hunters-down," stood the fortress which the owners had so lately abandoneda fortress of importance as commanding the passage of the Ouse, whose site, as well as that of the burh with which Eadward replaced it, is still marked by the mounds which rise over the river. Master of the whole Ouse-valley, a fresh march of the king to Colchester, and his rebuilding of the town, was followed by the sudden submission of all the Danes of East-Anglia and Essex, as well as of Toglos and Manna, Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 921. 2 Eng, Chron. a. 921. СНАР. У. Elfred. 901937. the "here" which found its centre at Cambridge; The House of and no part of the Fen country remained to the Danelaw save the northern tract about Stamford. The town stood on a stone-ford over the Welland, and was one of the Five Boroughs, with its twelve lawmen and Danish burghers and common lands beyond the walls. But it submitted when the king and his fyrd marched on it in 922; and its obedience was secured by a mound and fort which Eadward raised over against it on the opposite bank of the river in what became a southern "burh" of lesser size.1 Ethelflæd attacks the Five What had made the king's triumph in Mid-Britain so easy and complete was to a great extent, no doubt, Boroughs. the energy of his sister in the west. While the English shire-levies cleared East-Anglia on one flank of his advance, Æthelflæd was mastering the Five Boroughs on the other. The march of Eadward on Northampton had in fact been made possible by the triumphs of the Mercian host in the valley of the Trent. As the river curves from the heights of Cannock Chase to the eastward, it receives the waters of two important affluents from the north and south. The Derwent flows down to it from the crags of the Peak, while the Soar wanders to it through the grassy levels of our Leicestershire. On one of these rivers the earlier English conquerors had planted their settlement of North-weorthig, whose position in the waste among the wild animals of the chase was marked by the new name it had received from the Danes, the name of Deora-by, or Derby. Under the Danes the place 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 922. 2 Ethelweard, a. 870, lib. iv. c. 2. CHAP. V. Elfred. 901 937. became one of the Five Boroughs round which the Danelaw of Mid-Britain grouped itself, and it was The House of the first of the five to bear Ethelflæd's attack. In the August of 917 it passed into her hands,' and in 918 she marched up the valley on her other flank, that of the Soar, to attack the second of the Five Boroughs, Leicester. Again her attack was successful, and within the walls of her own conquest she is said to have heard of the submission of York.2 The news of this last triumph however had hardly Mid-Britain reached Eadward when it was followed by the news conquered. of Ethelflæd's death. But the blow came too late to save the Danelaw. Only two of the Five Boroughs indeed now remained unconquered; and Eadward's siege of the first of these, Nottingham, completed the work of the year. The town stood on the bend of the Trent, a few miles eastward of the confluence of the Derwent and the Soar. It was here that the road from the south crossed the great river, for further along its course the marshes of Axholme hindered all passage; and the importance of the place had been shown at the very outset of the Danish wars when its seizure by the pirates foiled the efforts of Ethelred and Ælfred to save the north from their grasp. size and wealth it was probably with Lincoln the most important of the Five Boroughs, while as a strategical point it was more important than any, for it 1 Eng. Chron. (Worc.), a. 917. In 2 Eng. Chron. (Worc.), a. 918, says of the Yorkmen: "Some gave her pledge, some bound themselves with oath, that they would be at her reding" (command). 3 Eadward was at Stamford at this time. Eng. Chron. (Winch.), a. 922. |