hundred and fifty ships, arrived in the mouth of the Thames, landed an army, stormed both Canterbury and London, defeated an army headed by the King of Mercia, and was moving through Surrey, when it was encountered by Ethelwulf and his son Ethelbald, and routed with immense slaughter at Ockley.[1] Nevertheless, that year the Danes wintered for the first time in Thanet.[2]
It is noteworthy that of the numerous actions recorded as having been fought between the Saxons and the Danes thus far, one only, namely, that in which Athelstan was victorious off Sandwich, is clearly indicated as having been a sea-fight. From this it might be supposed that the Saxons had an inadequate navy; but by far the more probable explanation is, that they did not properly utilise such navy as they had. They seem, before the days of Alfred, to have thought more of guarding their coasts than of finding and defeating the enemy at sea; and as the usual policy of the Danes was to make a sudden raid, land a force, and allow it to shift for itself, and subsist upon the resources of the country until it could find opportunity to re-embark at another point, the Saxon tactics of stationing their vessels in or near the important ports may well have been very ineffective.
Ethelbert, who reigned from 860 to 866, was not more fortunate than his predecessors, and at one time his capital, Winchester, was attacked by his northern enemies. The reign, too, of Ethelred, from 866 to 871, was disastrous. The Danes made themselves masters of Northumbria and part of Mercia, seized Nottingham, completely conquered East Anglia, and advancing for the attack on Wessex, made Reading their headquarters. Led by Bagsecg and Halfdene, they fought no fewer than nine great battles in that neighbourhood in the course of the year 871, and were on several occasions successful; but King Ethelred and his brother Alfred beat them badly at Ashdown, near Didcot, and killed Halfdene. Ethelred, who seems to have been wounded there or in one of the subsequent and less successful fights at Basing and Merton, died soon afterwards, and Alfred, then probably in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year, came to the imperilled crown.
Alfred's reign began badly. In the early summer of 871 he was defeated by the Danes at Wilton, and apparently so dispirited that he came to terms with the invaders, and offered them that which
