Chapter I The Coming of the Danes "Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, sound an alarm in my holy mountain, for it is nigh at hand; a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, as the dawn spread upon the mountains : A great people and a strong, there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after them even to the years of many generations. A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea and none hath escaped them. The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses: and as horsemen so do they run. Like the noise of chariots on the top of the mountains do they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array. At their presence the peoples are in anguish ; all faces are waxed pale. They run like mighty men : they climb the wall like men of war: and they march everyone on his ways 61 ASITY and they break not their ranks. Neither shall one thrust another, They shall walk ever one in his path: And when they fall upon the sword they shall not be wounded. They leap upon the city; they run upon the wall; they climb up into the houses; they enter into the windows like a thief. The earth quaketh before them : the heavens tremble: the sun and the moon are darkened, the stars withdraw their shining: the Lord uttereth his voice before his army; For his camp is very great : for he is strong that executeth his word. For the day of the Lord is great and very and who can abide it?" terrible : Book of Joel. THE events of the fifteen years which intervene between Alfred's boyhood and accession to the throne are of great importance for England. But the important events have very little to do with the internal affairs of Wessex. Wherever there were eyes able to read the signs of the times they were fixed on the signs of a gathering tempest. At first there is "a cloud no bigger than a man's hand," but as one black cloud is piled upon another the horizon darkens on every side till the sky is pregnant with terrible possibilities of destruction. To the men of the time the coming of the Danes seemed like some terrible natural cataclysm, inevitable, swift, destructive, threatening to blast and root up the rude achievements of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and overwhelm both the religion and the very existence of the nation in a deluge of heathenism. Before examining the nature and extent of the threatened calamity, it may be well to retrace some chronological steps, and to pass in brief review the events which left Alfred to face the storm alone at the early age of twenty-two. When Ethelwulf returned from the court of Charles the Bald with Judith as his bride, and Alfred in his train, he found his people unwilling to receive him. Whatever may have been the motive behind the marriage, political or not, his young wife had cost him his crown. When the news reached England that Judith had been crowned Queen by Archbishop Hincmar at the court of Charles, the men of Wessex discovered that they had no mind to have a queen at all, much less a queen crowned in a foreign court. Æthelwulf returned home only to find that the thegns of Wessex with Ealhstan, the warrior Bishop of Sherborne, and Eanwulf, the great ealdorman of Somerset, had sworn an oath in Selwood Forest to set his son Æthelbald on the throne. The magnanimous instinct characteristic of his house did not desert the king. He knew that "The king who fights his people fights himself," |