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If we admire the heroic defence of the Saxon king, we
cannot forget that most of us who form the English
nation have in our veins more than a little of the
Viking blood. We owe our existence as much to one
side as to the other, and it is a false patriotism and a
mistaken view of history which asks us to give our
sympathies exclusively to either party in this struggle
of a thousand years ago. To tell the story fully in
the limits of this work is impossible ; we must, however,
sketch the course of events in order to make the
results intelligible.
When Æthelred, the fourth son of Ecgberht, succeeded
to the throne, his accession was the signal for
the beginning of troubles to which all previous incursions
had been literally like ships that pass in the
night. In that year 866, says Æthelwerd, "the
fleets of the tyrant Hingwar arrived in England from
the north,"—de Danubio, says Asser ; de Danubia,
Symeon copies him : from Denmark, of course—"and
wintered among the East Angles; and having
established their arms there, they got them horses,
and made peace with all the inhabitants of their own
neighbourhood." In other words, they became a force
of wonderfully active and mobile mounted infantry,
like the hobelars of the thirteenth century or the
Boers of recent times ; and their new policy was to
conciliate the immediate neighbourhood in which they
settled, in order to form a base of operations. This
was a repetition of the policy already seen in Cornwall,
Brittany and Wales ; and now it seems to have
been applied to East Anglia, where the natives—still
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