remainder, with their king, gave hostages that they would embrace Christianity and depart from the country; which they performed. For their king, Gothrun, whom our people call Grurmund, with thirty nobles and almost all the commonalty, was baptized, Alfred standing for him; and the provinces of the East Angles, and Northumbrians[1] were given up to him, in order that he might, under fealty to the king, protect with hereditary right, what before he had overrun with predatory incursion. However, as the Ethiopian cannot change his skin, he domineered over these tributary provinces with the haughtiness of a tyrant for eleven years, and died in the twelfth, transmitting to his posterity the inheritance of his disloyalty, until subdued by Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred, they were, though reluctantly, compelled to admit one common king of England, as we see at the present day. Such of the Danes as had refused to become Christians, together with Hastings, went over sea, where the inhabitants are best able to tell what cruelties they perpetrated. For overrunning the whole maritime coasts to the Tuscan sea, they unpeopled Paris and Tours, as well as many other cities seated on the Seine and Loire, those noted rivers of France. At that time the bodies of many saints being taken up from the spot of their original interment and conveyed to safer places, have ennobled foreign churches with their relics even to this day. Then also the body of St. Martin, venerated, as Sidonius says, over the whole earth, in which virtue resides though life be at an end, was taken to Auxerre, by the clergy of his church, and placed in that of St. German, where it astonished the people of that district by unheard-of miracles. And when they who came thither, out of gratitude for cures performed, contributed many things to requite the labours of those who had borne him to this church, as is commonly the case, a dispute arose about the division of the money; the Turonians claiming the whole, because their patron had called the contributors together by his miracles: the natives, on the other hand, alleging that St. German was not unequal in merit, and was of equal
- ↑ This seems a mistake as far relates to Northumbria. The Saxon Chronicle has "Northerna," and Florence of Worcester "Rex Northmanicus," which at a first glance might easily be converted into Northumbria.
