for son) made his appearance and ran his brief course, like a great
and far-seen meteor, soon extinguished without result. No remedy for
England in that base time, but yearly asking the victorious,
plundering, burning and murdering Danes, "How much money will you take
to go away?" Thirty thousand pounds in silver, which the annual
_Danegelt_ soon rose to, continued to be about the average yearly sum,
though generally on the increasing hand; in the last year I think it
had risen to seventy-two thousand pounds in silver, raised yearly by a
tax (Income-tax of its kind, rudely levied), the worst of all
remedies, good for the day only. Nay, there was one remedy still
worse, which the miserable Ethelred once tried: that of massacring
"all the Danes settled in England" (practically, of a few thousands or
hundreds of them), by treachery and a kind of Sicilian Vespers. Which
issued, as such things usually do, in terrible monition to you not to
try the like again! Issued, namely, in redoubled fury on the Danish
part; new fiercer invasion by Svein's Jarl Thorkel; then by Svein
himself; which latter drove the miserable Ethelred, with wife and
family, into Normandy, to wife's brother, the then Duke there; and
ended that miserable struggle by Svein's becoming King of England
himself. Of this disgraceful massacre, which it would appear has been
immensely exaggerated in the English books, we can happily give the
exact date (A.D. 1002); and also of Svein's victorious accession (A.D.
1013),[9]--pretty much the only benefit one gets out of contemplating
such a set of objects.

King Svein's first act was to levy a terribly increased Income-Tax for
the payment of his army. Svein was levying it with a stronghanded
diligence, but had not yet done levying it, when, at Gainsborough one
night, he suddenly died; smitten dead, once used to be said, by St.
Edmund, whilom murdered King of the East Angles; who could not bear to