skill which surprises us as we gaze upon the craft which have survived the centuries. They were seventy feet long, and more; they could carry a large number of warriors; their low free-board was made safe by the shields of the ship's company; they carried one sail only, and the crew rowed when the wind was not favourable; they were swift either in rowing or sailing; they had a very light draught, such as would enable them to be run into the narrow and shallow streams which offered the only access into the interior. They carried no more provisions than were necessary for the voyage, for the crew lived upon the country where they landed; they carried no horses, but seized on all that they could find.

Among all the fierce fighting men of the time the Dane was the fiercest. He was governed by the most cruel and the most narrow notions of savage warfare. The historians show him to have been ruthless to the last degree; he was without pity for his prisoners and captives. The men whom he spared became his slaves; the women, even the daughters of king and noble, he treated with greatest possible shame and the most cruel humiliation, throwing them to the common soldiers. He had no pity for himself; he encouraged himself in the contempt for death-all peoples at a certain stage do this. The Dane did more he encouraged himself in the contempt for pain. His histories record the most amazing stories of things which he endured apparently without a murmur, as when a noble prisoner was offered the choice of death by burning or marriage with the king's daughter, and preferred to die at the stake. And even after his conversion to Christianity, he looked forward with joy.

ful anticipation to an eternity of fighting and feasting.

At first, like the men of Norway, who probably accompanied them, the Danes avoided battles, preferring to plunder and to hurry away than to risk their booty in a battle. But the weak and defenceless condition of England, divided as it was into so many little kingdoms, simply invited them to stay and settle. Then their army ceased to return to Denmark in the autumn; they drew up their ships, fortified their camp, and went into winter quarters. In the spring more ships came with reinforcements, and the Danes again spread themselves over the country.

At the beginning of Alfred's reign, then, we find the Danes in possession of the Isle of Thanet -that is to say, commanding the Thames and the whole of Kent and Essex. The whole of Northumbria was in their hands; they had a permanent camp at York; they had ravaged the midland and eastern countries; they had fortified camps between the Severn and the Thames; there remained as yet to the Saxon nothing but the south-only Alfred's kingdom of Wessex, with a part of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent.

This was the situation when Alfred was born; during his days of boyhood and when he mounted a throne so full of peril, so tottering, so threatened, everything was destroyed-order, peace, religion; all the priests and monks who could not fly were murdered; learning, arts, freedom, safety -nothing was left to the unhappy land, except terror, blackened ruins and the memory of peace.

CHAPTER II.

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION.

ALFRED was the fifth son of Ethelwulf, King of the West Saxons. His genealogy, as important for the Royal House in the ninth as in the twentieth century, has been already set forth at length (see p. 19), with the chain which connects our King Edward VII. with Alfred, Cerdic, and the great god Wodin.

Alfred was born at the town or village of Wantage in Berkshire. His birth took place in the year 849. The town still preserves a traditional memory of his birthplace in an enclosure called the High Garden, said to have been the site of the ancient palace, and in the name of an orchard, called the Court Close. There seems to be no reason for disbelieving the tradition. Wantage has been occupied continuously since the time of Alfred, and the people were not likely to lose the memory of so great a king, their most illustrious townsman. Outside the town there is a doubtful tradition attached to a basin of water fed by springs called King Alfred Bath.

The country round Wantage consists mainly of barren downs and chalk hills, on which are numerous "castles" or forts of earthwork, and moats constructed by the Britons, and speaking of the struggle in which the unfortunate people were slowly driven westward. That struggle had been happily completed two hundred years before the arrival of Alfred, though there were still tracts of land in the possession of the Britons, and still raids and incursions on the part of this

people. All that Alfred heard about the history of the war was a confused tradition of long and victorious fighting; the legends and the poetry and the glory of the war fell to the lot of the defeated, who, as generally happens, consoled themselves with the legends and achievements of Uther Pendragon, King Arthur and his valiant knights, for the defeats which cooped them up in Wales and Cornwall. There was no King Arthur among

the Saxons.

Alfred's mother was Osburh, daughter of Oslac, butler or cupbearer to King Ethelwulf, descended from the same line as the king himself, through the nephew of Cerdic. His ancestors had possessed themselves of the Isle of Wight after the slaughter at Carisbrook of all the people who could not escape.

It is remarkable that the further back history penetrates into the obscurity of the past, the deeper is the gulf, the more marked is the separation, between the noble class and the ceorls. Since men began to unite for purposes of protection, there has never been a time, discernible at least, when there was not a caste of nobles. They were always the king's men, with privileges of their own such as make rank a real thing, holding their rank and privileges on the condition of fighting for king and country. They were the nucleus of a standing army and the champions of their people. It must not be supposed that they were at any time, unless at a time of decay, a fainéant class. On the contrary, they maintained their position with the most desperate courage, even under the most adverse circumstances. If, as has been said, the first king was a victorious soldier, then the first nobles were the men who fought

under his banner; they were a kind of knights bannerets created on the field: they were enriched with the spoils of war-the wealth of the conquered. The greatest incentive to fierce fighting among the nobles was the certainty that defeat would lead to the loss of everything that makes life tolerable-independence, position, wealth. It is true that these fighting men imagined a heaven where they could fight all day and feast all night, but, like every other kind of heaven, it was not in prospect half so desirable as the present joys of earth.

Nothing is known about Osburh beyond the vague reports of Asser and others. She is credited with the knowledge of those arts and accomplishments which all the Saxon ladies possessed, and with the piety which belonged to most of them. The Teutonic respect for women was nowhere more marked than in England: we cannot doubt that she enjoyed, not only as a great lady, but also as a woman, the highest possible consideration. One would wish to know more about her, but it was enough for a woman in that age to be the mother of children, the faithful wife, the head of the household, the ruler of her maidens and serving-women, the directress of her son's early education; that Osburh was also the adviser and counsellor of her husband, we may very well believe. Into the rest we need not inquire.

Let me quote Asser on Alfred's childhood—

"He was loved by his father and mother, and even by all the people, above all his brothers, and was educated altogether at the court of the king. As he advanced through all the years of infancy and youth, his form ap peared more comely than that of his brothers; in look, in