fortifications, and rushed into the city. The Danes attacked them both,
and defeated them with great slaughter. Northumbria passed at once into
the power of the heathen. Their chiefs, Ingvar and Ubba, erected Deira
into a new Danish kingdom, leaving Bernicia to an English puppet; and
Northumbria ceases to exist for the present as a factor in Anglo-Saxon
history. We must hand it over for sixty years to the Scandinavian
division of this series.

In 868, Ingvar and Ubba advanced again into Mercia and beset Nottingham.
Then the under-king Burhred called in the aid of his over-lord, Æthelred
of Wessex, who came to his assistance with a levy. "But there was no
hard fight there, and the Mercians made peace with the host." In 870,
the heathen overran East Anglia, and destroyed the great monastery of
Peterborough, probably the richest religious house in all England.
Eadmund, the under-king, came against them with the levy, but they slew
him; and the people held him for a martyr, whose shrine at Bury St.
Edmunds grew in after days into the holiest spot in East Anglia. The
Danes harried the whole country, burnt the monasteries, and annexed
Norfolk and Suffolk as a second Danish kingdom. East Anglia, too,
disappears for a while from our English annals.

Lastly, the Danes turned against Mercia and Wessex. In 871, a host under
Bagsecg and Halfdene came to Reading, which belonged to the latter
territory, when the local ealdorman engaged them and won a slight
victory. Shortly afterward the West Saxon king Æthelred, with his
brother Ælfred, came up, and engaged them a second time with worse
success. Three other bloody battles followed, in all of which the Danes
were beaten with heavy loss; but the West Saxons also suffered severely.
For three years the host moved up and down through Mercia and Wessex;
and the Mercians stood by, aiding neither side, but "making peace with