the host" from time to time. At last, however, in 874, the heathens
finally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself. "The host fared from
Lindsey to Repton, and there sat for the winter, and drove King Burhred
over sea, two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom; and they
subdued all the land. And Burhred went to Rome, and there settled; and
his body lies in St. Mary's Church, in the school of the English kin.
And in the same year they gave the kingdom of Mercia in ward to
Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostages
that it should be ready for them on whatso day they willed; and that he
would be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, for
the behoof of the host." Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out
of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains.

This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarily
tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highly
important and interesting facts. It is impossible not to be struck with
the extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invaders
overran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states. We
cannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmness
of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by Ælfred in Wessex.
The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of native
Northumbrian and Mercian accounts. We might, perhaps, find, had we
fuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fight
for their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead
us to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness of
our authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathen
kingdom was established in the pure English land of Bæda and Cuthberht,
while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own for
ever in peninsular and half-Celtic Wessex.