a common, but none the more excusable, anachronism. Ælfred was a sturdy
and hearty fighter, and a good king of a semi-barbaric people. As a lad,
he had visited Rome; and he retained throughout life a strong sense of
his own and his people's barbarism, and a genuine desire to civilise
himself and his subjects, so far as his limited lights could carry him.
He succeeded to a kingdom overrun from end to end by piratical hordes:
and he did his best to restore peace and to promote order. But his
character was merely that of a practical, common-sense, fighting West
Saxon, brought up in the camp of his father and brothers, and doing his
rough work in life with the honest straightforwardness of a simple,
hard-headed, religious, but only half-educated barbaric soldier.

The successful East Anglian wickings, under their chief Guthrum, turned
at once to ravage Wessex. They "harried the West Saxons' land, and
settled there, and drove many of the folk over sea." For awhile it
seemed as if Wessex too was to fall into their hands. Ælfred himself,
with a little band, "withdrew to the woods and moor-fastnesses." He took
refuge in the Somerset marshes, and there occupied a little island of
dry land in the midst of the fens, by name Athelney. Here he threw up a
rude earthwork, from which he made raids against the Danes, with a petty
levy of the nearest Somerset men. But the mass of the West Saxons were
not disposed to give in so easily. The long border warfare with Devon
and Cornwall had probably kept up their organisation in a better state
than that of the anarchic North. The men of Somerset and Wilts, with
those Hampshire men who had not fled to the Continent, gathered at a
sacred stone on the borders of Selwood Forest, and there Ælfred met them
with his little band. They attacked the host, which they put to flight,
and then besieged it in its fortified camp. To escape the siege, Guthrum
consented to leave Wessex, and to accept Christianity. He was baptised
at once, with thirty of his principal chiefs, after the rough-and-ready