despatched in the sixteenth year of his reign, by Hingwar, a heathen; from which time the Angles ceased to command in their own country for fifty years. For the province was nine years without a king, owing to the continued devastations of the pagans; afterwards both in it and in East Saxony, Gothrun, a Danish king, reigned for twelve years, in the time of king Alfred. Gothrun had for successor a Dane also, by name Eohric, who, after he had reigned fourteen years, was taken off by the Angles, because he conducted himself with cruelty towards them. Still, however, liberty beamed not on this people, for the Danish earls continued to oppress them, or else to excite them against the kings of the West Saxons, till Edward, the son of Alfred, added both provinces to his own West Saxon empire, expelling the Danes and freeing the Angles. This event took place in the fiftieth year after the murder of St. Edmund, king and martyr, and in the fifteenth[1] of his own reign.
CHAP. VI.
Of the kings of the East Saxons. [a.d. 520—823.
Nearly co-eval with the kingdom of the East Angles, was that of the East Saxons; which had many kings in succession, though subject to others, and principally to those of the Mercians. First, then, Sleda,[2] the tenth from Woden, reigned over them; whose son, Sabert, nephew of St. Ethelbert, king of Kent, by his sister Ricula, embraced the faith of Christ at the preaching of St. Mellitus, first bishop of London; for that city belongs to the East Saxons. On the death of Sabert, his sons, Sexred and Seward, drove Mellitus into banishment, and soon after, being killed by the West Saxons, they paid the penalty of their persecution against Christ. Sigbert, surnamed the Small, the son of Seward, succeeding, left the kingdom to Sigebert, the son of Sigebald,
- ↑ According to the Saxon Chronicle, a.d. 921, that is, the 21st of Edward the Elder, and the fiftieth from the murder of king Edmund. Now following this statement, as Edward succeeded his father, Alfred a.d. 901, the expulsion of the Danes would be the twentieth of his reign. In Florence of Worcester the union of the kingdoms under Edward the Elder is assigned to the year 918.—Hardy.
- ↑ Sleda was not the first, but their times are uncertain. See Florence of Worcester, who calls him the son of Escwine, whom Henry of Huntingdon considers to have been the first king of Essex.
