General Notes

[Joanne's Tree.1 GED.GED]

[Etienne De Coligny.FTW]

[Herve De Chatillon-Sur-Marne.ged]

ID: I09130
Name: Alfred "The Great" King Of England 1 2
Sex: M
Birth: 12 MAY 849 in Wantage, Berkshire, Canterbury, England
Death: 26 OCT 899 in Winchester, Hampshire, Canterbury, England 2
Event: TITL King Of Wessex 2
Reference Number: 5455

Note
The most justly celebrated of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, was King of Wessex from 871 until 899. Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, the youngest son of King Ethelwulf of Wessex and his first wife, Osburh. The short reigns and early deaths of his elder brothers Ethelbald (858-850), Ethelbert (860-865) and Ethelred I (865-871) brought Alfred to the throne of Wessex at the age of about twenty-two in 871. Alfred's lifetime was overshadowed by the Danish invasions of England. Between 865 and 870 the Danes had conquered the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria and had forced Mercia into submission. In 870 they decided to move against Wessex and established themselves in winter quarters at Reading. Five battles were fought in the winter and early spring of 870-871, at Englefield, Reading, Ashdown, Basing and the unidentified Meretun. Of these only Ashdown was a West Saxon victory. Shortly after the last battle the Danes were reinforced by another Viking army. At the time of Alfred's accession in April 871 the advantage lay firmly with the invaders. For the new king the outlook was bleak, and it was to remain so for some time. In May Alfred was defeated again, at Wilton, after which he decided to capitulate as the Mercians had done. A contemporary put the best interpretation on it that he could: "the Saxons made peace with the Vikings on condition that they would leave them; and this they did." What this almost certainly means is that Alfred paid them to go away; what later generations were to call paying Danegeld. The Danes kept their word. Between 871 and 875 they busied themselves with Mercia and Northumberland. A second invasion of Wessex occurred in 876-77. Under their leader Guthrum, the Danes struck deeper than ever before into Wessex, and established themselves first at Wareham in Dorset and then at Exeter. Once more Alfred was forced to buy peace from them and they withdrew across the Mercian border in the summer of 877 to a new base at Gloucester. A third invasion followed soon. In January 878 the Danes entered Wessex, settled at Chippenham and subjected large areas of the kingdom to their authority. With only a small following Alfred fled to the west and found refuge at Athelney in Somerset, in the marshy country of the Parrett valley. (The episode of Alfred and the cakes, first committed to writing about a century after his death, was located during the retreat at Athelney.) Had the king died at this point he would be remembered, if at all, only as a failure. But Alfred survived and prospered. During the spring of 878 he quietly mustered troops and from the fortress which he had constructed at Athelney he waged guerilla war upon the Danes. By May he was ready to challenge them openly. He advanced eastwards, gathering support from the county levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire as he went. They encountered Guthrum's army at Edington in Wiltshire and decisively defeated it, pursuing the survivors as far as their stronghold at Chippenham. After a fortnight the Danes surrendered. Their leader Guthrum was baptized a Christian in June and they swore to leave Wessex in peace, a promise which they carried out later in the year. Alfred had won the struggle for survival.

Towards the end of 884 part of a Viking army which had been campaigning in Francia crossed the Channel to Kent and laid siege to Rochester. Alfred relieved the town and eventually managed to chase the intruders back to the Continent. Guthrum's followers, settled in East Anglia since 880, had assisted the Vikings from the Continent, and it was in an attempt to neutralise them that Alfred sent a naval force against East Anglia in the summer of 885, which had mixed success, and in 886 occupied London. Shortly afterwards he made a peace-treaty with Guthrum. Apart from these events, during the fourteen years between 878 and 892 Wessex was unmolested. These were the creative years in which Alfred initiated his programme of military reform and cultural revival. In 892 the Danes returned in force and Alfred's defensive measures were put to the test. The war of 892-96 is reported at considerable length in the contemporary record of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Without following the campaigns in detail we may say that once more the Danish strategy rested upon the occupation of bases from which raids could be launched. However, there were contrasts with the earlier crises of 870-71 and 875-78. Whereas the earlier invaders had repeatedly penetrated into the heart of Alfred's kingdom (e.g. Wilton 871, Wareham 876) those of 892-96 got into Wessex only once, in 893. Whereas the earlier invaders had won victory after victory, particularly in the years 870-71, the Danes who broke into Wessex in 893 were defeated by the king's son Edward at Fareham before they had got very far. Furthermore, although the Danes were difficult to pin down and bring to battle, the English forces could on occasion do this. They matched the mobility of the Danes, pursuing them right up the valley of the Severn in 893. They could dislodge them from their bases, as at Chester in 894 and in the valley of the river Lea near London in 895. They could sometimes corner and defeat them, as ealdorman Ethelred of Mercia, Alfred's son-in-law, did at Buttington in 893. They could also by now engage the Danes by sea as well as on land, as in 896, with at least fair success. By the summer of 896 the Danish leaders had realised that Wessex was too well-defended for them. Their army dispersed, some to East Anglia or Northumbria, some to further campaigning across the Channel in Francia. The remaining three years of Alfred's reign are ill-documented but were apparently peaceful. He died on 27 October 899, aged about fifty, and was buried at Winchester.

Alfred was probably a good deal more aware of the continent of Europe than have been at least some nineteenth and twentieth-century historians who have devoted their attention to him. He had visited Rome as a boy in the company of his father. He regularly sent alms to Rome and received at least one letter from Pope John VIII. His sister Aethelswith, the wife of King Burgred of Mercia who was deposed by the Danes in 874, spent her later years in Italy until her death in 888. Alfred's father Ethelwulf had had a Frankish secretary and had married as his second wife a Frankish princess. Alfred's wife Ealhswith --- they were married in 868---was English, a noblewoman descended from the Mercian royal dynasty. Of the five children of their marriage who lived to maturity, one of the daughters, Aelfthryth, married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders, between 893 and 899. Alfred corresponded with Archbishop Fulk of Rheims, and attracted scholars from Francia such as Grimbald and John to his court. The compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was knowledgeable about Frankish affairs. We can sense a web of contact between Alfred's Wessex and the western European continent that may have been a good deal more dense than the surviving evidence allows us to see.

It was not only in the military field that Alfred may have been indebted to his Frankish neighbors. There is the code of laws which was probably drawn up about 890. We cannot be certain that any English ruler had issued laws since King Ine of Wessex nearly two centuries earlier. Frankish rulers of the ninth century, especially Charles the Bald (died 877) whose court Alfred had visited, had been tireless, one might almost say frenzied legislators. Some of the individual clauses in Alfred's laws betray the influence of Frankish practice, the requirement, for example, that his subjects should swear an oath of loyalty to him. During the 880s, in all probability, the town of Winchester was comprehensively replanned inside its refurbished Roman defenses. A new grid-pattern of streets was laid down, bounded by a road which ran round the inside of the walls. This operation involved the laying of at least five miles of road and their surfacing with nearly 8000 tons of flint cobbles. Only a king could have mobilised the resources for such a task: the initiative must have been Alfred's. Winchester included a royal palace, a cathedral and its community, a new monastery probably planned by Alfred although not completed until after his death, and a nunnery founded by Queen Ealhswith. It also housed a royal mint, merchants on whose services the court depended, and residences for the counsellors in attendance on the King. Alfred's Winchester was not exactly a capital city in our sense of the term, but it was the closest thing to one in Wessex---a favoured royal residence, a place of ceremonial, prayer and liturgy, a fit setting for solemn acts of state and a mausoleum where kings would rest and be remembered after their deaths. Surely its inspiration was, at least in part, Frankish. Alfred's Winchester was to Wessex what Charlemagne's Aachen was to the kingdom of the Franks.

Like Frankish rulers such as Charlemagne or Charles the Bald, though on a more modest scale, Alfred was a patron of learning. Unlike them, he personally contributed to the intellectual revival which he sponsored and it is this activity which is his most enduring claim to fame. Alfred regarded his attempts to rehabilitate English learning as part and parcel of his kingly responsibilities. To this end Alfred recruited a number of learned men, Plegmund, a native of Mercia who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 890; the Welshman Asser, who became Bishop of Sherborne; another Mercian, Bishop Werferth of Worcester; a Flemish monk, Grimbald of St. Bertin's; and a monk from continental Saxony named John who was made Abbot of Alfred's monastic foundation at Athelney. Through the efforts of these five men, and doubtless of others whose names we do not know, the ground was prepared for the intellectual achievements of the tenth century.

Alfred's own contribution to the revival of learning was to translate from Latin into Old English 'certain books,' in his own words, 'which are the most necessary for all men to know.' He had learned to read the vernacular as a child and went on to learn Latin as a grown man. Alfred personally translated three books, the Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Rule) of Pope Gregory I, the Soliloquies of St. Augustine of Hippo, and the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.

It was Asser who rendered unforgettably in his biography those aspects of Alfred's character which so appealed to the Victorians: his moral uprightness, his warm family life, his struggles against ill health, his earnest self-improvement. Alfred was a man of robustly traditional tastes---a warrior, a hunter, a ring-giver---as well as the scholar and seeker after knowledge revealed in his writings. He was a man of his time, like everyone else. His achievements rested in some degree on foundations laid by his father Ethelwulf and on lessons learned from his Frankish neighbours. He had an orderly mind and he was fertile in practical expedient, whether in the construction of ships or of lantern-clocks. He was also endowed with a speculative mind, charged with intellectual vitality. How many kings have taught themselves Latin at the age of thirty eight? "He stood, I believe, head and shoulders above all the kings of England who came before and after him." This was the verdict of an Anglo-Norman historian writing in about 1120. I see no reason why a historian writing in the 1980s should dissent from that judgement.
[Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England, Richard Fletcher, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., London, 1989].

Father: Aethelwulf King Of Wessex b: ABT 806 in Wessex, England
Mother: Osburga Of Isle Of Wight b: ABT 810 in Wessex, England

Marriage 1 Ealhswith Of Mercia b: ABT 852 in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, England
Married: 868 in Winchester, England 1 2
Children
Ethelfleda (Aethelflaed) Of England b: ABT 869 in Wessex, England
Edward I "The Elder" King Of England b: ABT 872 in Wessex, England
Elfthryth (Aefithryth) Of Wessex b: ABT 872 in Wessex, England

Sources:
Title: World Family Tree Vol. 7, Ed. 1
Author: Brøderbund Software, Inc.
Publication: Release date: October 17, 1996
Note: Customer pedigree.
Repository:
Call Number:
Media: Family Archive CD
Page: Tree #0328
Text: Date of Import: Mar 25, 1998
Title: woodward.FTW
Repository:
Call Number:
Media: Other
Text: Date of Import: Nov 7, 2000
[Aethelwulf King Of Wessex.ged]

The most justly celebrated of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, was King of Wessex from 871 until 899. Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, the youngest son of King Ethelwulf of Wessex and his first wife, Osburh. The short reigns and early deaths of his elder brothers Ethelbald (858-850), Ethelbert (860-865) and Ethelred I (865-871) brought Alfred to the throne of Wessex at the age of about twenty-two in 871. Alfred's lifetime was overshadowed by the Danish invasions of England. Between 865 and 870 the Danes had conquered the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria and had forced Mercia into submission. In 870 they decided to move against Wessex and established themselves in winter quarters at Reading. Five battles were fought in the winter and early spring of 870-871, at Englefield, Reading, Ashdown, Basing and the unidentified Meretun. Of these only Ashdown was a West Saxon victory. Shortly after the last battle the Danes were reinforced by another Viking army. At the time of Alfred's accession in April 871 the advantage lay firmly with the invaders. For the new king the outlook was bleak, and it was to remain so for some time. In May Alfred was defeated again, at Wilton, after which he decided to capitulate as the Mercians had done. A contemporary put the best interpretation on it that he could: "the Saxons made peace with the Vikings on condition that they would leave them; and this they did." What this almost certainly means is that Alfred paid them to go away; what later generations were to call paying Danegeld. The Danes kept their word. Between 871 and 875 they busied themselves with Mercia and Northumberland. A second invasion of Wessex occurred in 876-77. Under their leader Guthrum, the Danes struck deeper than ever before into Wessex, and established themselves first at Wareham in Dorset and then at Exeter. Once more Alfred was forced to buy peace from them and they withdrew across the Mercian border in the summer of 877 to a new base at Gloucester. A third invasion followed soon. In January 878 the Danes entered Wessex, settled at Chippenham and subjected large areas of the kingdom to their authority. With only a small following Alfred fled to the west and found refuge at Athelney in Somerset, in the marshy country of the Parrett valley. (The episode of Alfred and the cakes, first committed to writing about a century after his death, was located during the retreat at Athelney.) Had the king died at this point he would be remembered, if at all, only as a failure. But Alfred survived and prospered. During the spring of 878 he quietly mustered troops and from the fortress which he had constructed at Athelney he waged guerilla war upon the Danes. By May he was ready to challenge them openly. He advanced eastwards, gathering support from the county levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire as he went. They encountered Guthrum's army at Edington in Wiltshire and decisively defeated it, pursuing the survivors as far as their stronghold at Chippenham. After a fortnight the Danes surrendered. Their leader Guthrum was baptized a Christian in June and they swore to leave Wessex in peace, a promise which they carried out later in the year. Alfred had won the struggle for survival.

Towards the end of 884 part of a Viking army which had been campaigning in Francia crossed the Channel to Kent and laid siege to Rochester. Alfred relieved the town and eventually managed to chase the intruders back to the Continent. Guthrum's followers, settled in East Anglia since 880, had assisted the Vikings from the Continent, and it was in an attempt to neutralise them that Alfred sent a naval force against East Anglia in the summer of 885, which had mixed success, and in 886 occupied London. Shortly afterwards he made a peace-treaty with Guthrum. Apart from these events, during the fourteen years between 878 and 892 Wessex was unmolested. These were the creative years in which Alfred initiated his programme of military reform and cultural revival. In 892 the Danes returned in force and Alfred's defensive measures were put to the test. The war of 892-96 is reported at considerable length in the contemporary record of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Without following the campaigns in detail we may say that once more the Danish strategy rested upon the occupation of bases from which raids could be launched. However, there were contrasts with the earlier crises of 870-71 and 875-78. Whereas the earlier invaders had repeatedly penetrated into the heart of Alfred's kingdom (e.g. Wilton 871, Wareham 876) those of 892-96 got into Wessex only once, in 893. Whereas the earlier invaders had won victory after victory, particularly in the years 870-71, the Danes who broke into Wessex in 893 were defeated by the king's son Edward at Fareham before they had got very far. Furthermore, although the Danes were difficult to pin down and bring to battle, the English forces could on occasion do this. They matched the mobility of the Danes, pursuing them right up the valley of the Severn in 893. They could dislodge them from their bases, as at Chester in 894 and in the valley of the river Lea near London in 895. They could sometimes corner and defeat them, as ealdorman Ethelred of Mercia, Alfred's son-in-law, did at Buttington in 893. They could also by now engage the Danes by sea as well as on land, as in 896, with at least fair success. By the summer of 896 the Danish leaders had realised that Wessex was too well-defended for them. Their army dispersed, some to East Anglia or Northumbria, some to further campaigning across the Channel in Francia. The remaining three years of Alfred's reign are ill-documented but were apparently peaceful. He died on 27 October 899, aged about fifty, and was buried at Winchester.

Alfred was probably a good deal more aware of the continent of Europe than have been at least some nineteenth and twentieth-century historians who have devoted their attention to him. He had visited Rome as a boy in the company of his father. He regularly sent alms to Rome and received at least one letter from Pope John VIII. His sister Aethelswith, the wife of King Burgred of Mercia who was deposed by the Danes in 874, spent her later years in Italy until her death in 888. Alfred's father Ethelwulf had had a Frankish secretary and had married as his second wife a Frankish princess. Alfred's wife Ealhswith --- they were married in 868---was English, a noblewoman descended from the Mercian royal dynasty. Of the five children of their marriage who lived to maturity, one of the daughters, Aelfthryth, married Baldwin II, Count of Flanders, between 893 and 899. Alfred corresponded with Archbishop Fulk of Rheims, and attracted scholars from Francia such as Grimbald and John to his court. The compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was knowledgeable about Frankish affairs. We can sense a web of contact between Alfred's Wessex and the western European continent that may have been a good deal more dense than the surviving evidence allows us to see.

It was not only in the military field that Alfred may have been indebted to his Frankish neighbors. There is the code of laws which was probably drawn up about 890. We cannot be certain that any English ruler had issued laws since King Ine of Wessex nearly two centuries earlier. Frankish rulers of the ninth century, especially Charles the Bald (died 877) whose court Alfred had visited, had been tireless, one might almost say frenzied legislators. Some of the individual clauses in Alfred's laws betray the influence of Frankish practice, the requirement, for example, that his subjects should swear an oath of loyalty to him. During the 880s, in all probability, the town of Winchester was comprehensively replanned inside its refurbished Roman defenses. A new grid-pattern of streets was laid down, bounded by a road which ran round the inside of the walls. This operation involved the laying of at least five miles of road and their surfacing with nearly 8000 tons of flint cobbles. Only a king could have mobilised the resources for such a task: the initiative must have been Alfred's. Winchester included a royal palace, a cathedral and its community, a new monastery probably planned by Alfred although not completed until after his death, and a nunnery founded by Queen Ealhswith. It also housed a royal mint, merchants on whose services the court depended, and residences for the counsellors in attendance on the King. Alfred's Winchester was not exactly a capital city in our sense of the term, but it was the closest thing to one in Wessex---a favoured royal residence, a place of ceremonial, prayer and liturgy, a fit setting for solemn acts of state and a mausoleum where kings would rest and be remembered after their deaths. Surely its inspiration was, at least in part, Frankish. Alfred's Winchester was to Wessex what Charlemagne's Aachen was to the kingdom of the Franks.

Like Frankish rulers such as Charlemagne or Charles the Bald, though on a more modest scale, Alfred was a patron of learning. Unlike them, he personally contributed to the intellectual revival which he sponsored and it is this activity which is his most enduring claim to fame. Alfred regarded his attempts to rehabilitate English learning as part and parcel of his kingly responsibilities. To this end Alfred recruited a number of learned men, Plegmund, a native of Mercia who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 890; the Welshman Asser, who became Bishop of Sherborne; another Mercian, Bishop Werferth of Worcester; a Flemish monk, Grimbald of St. Bertin's; and a monk from continental Saxony named John who was made Abbot of Alfred's monastic foundation at Athelney. Through the efforts of these five men, and doubtless of others whose names we do not know, the ground was prepared for the intellectual achievements of the tenth century.

Alfred's own contribution to the revival of learning was to translate from Latin into Old English 'certain books,' in his own words, 'which are the most necessary for all men to know.' He had learned to read the vernacular as a child and went on to learn Latin as a grown man. Alfred personally translated three books, the Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Rule) of Pope Gregory I, the Soliloquies of St. Augustine of Hippo, and the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.

It was Asser who rendered unforgettably in his biography those aspects of Alfred's character which so appealed to the Victorians: his moral uprightness, his warm family life, his struggles against ill health, his earnest self-improvement. Alfred was a man of robustly traditional tastes---a warrior, a hunter, a ring-giver---as well as the scholar and seeker after knowledge revealed in his writings. He was a man of his time, like everyone else. His achievements rested in some degree on foundations laid by his father Ethelwulf and on lessons learned from his Frankish neighbours. He had an orderly mind and he was fertile in practical expedient, whether in the construction of ships or of lantern-clocks. He was also endowed with a speculative mind, charged with intellectual vitality. How many kings have taught themselves Latin at the age of thirty eight? "He stood, I believe, head and shoulders above all the kings of England who came before and after him." This was the verdict of an Anglo-Norman historian writing in about 1120. I see no reason why a historian writing in the 1980s should dissent from that judgement.
[Who's Who in Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England, Richard Fletcher, Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers Ltd., London, 1989].[Osburga Of Isle Of Wight.ged]

The most justly celebrated of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, was King of Wessex from 871 until 899. Alfred was born at Wantage in 849, the youngest son of King Ethelwulf of Wessex and his first wife, Osburh. The short reigns and early deaths of his elder brothers Ethelbald (858-850), Ethelbert (860-865) and Ethelred I (865-871) brought Alfred to the throne of Wessex at the age of about twenty-two in 871. Alfred's lifetime was overshadowed by the Danish invasions of England. Between 865 and 870 the Danes had conquered the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria and had forced Mercia into submission. In 870 they decided to move against Wessex and established themselves in winter quarters at Reading. Five battles were fought in the winter and early spring of 870-871, at Englefield, Reading, Ashdown, Basing and the unidentified Meretun. Of these only Ashdown was a West Saxon victory. Shortly after the last battle the Danes were reinforced by another Viking army. At the time of Alfred's accession in April 871 the advantage lay firmly with the invaders. For the new king the outlook was bleak, and it was to remain so for some time. In May Alfred was defeated again, at Wilton, after which he decided to capitulate as the Mercians had done. A contemporary put the best interpretation on it that he could: "the Saxons made peace with the Vikings on condition that they would leave them; and this they did." What this almost certainly means is that Alfred paid them to go away; what later generations were to call paying Danegeld. The Danes kept their word. Between 871 and 875 they busied themselves with Mercia and Northumberland. A second invasion of Wessex occurred in 876-77. Under their leader Guthrum, the Danes struck deeper than ever before into Wessex, and established themselves first at Wareham in Dorset and then at Exeter. Once more Alfred was forced to buy peace from them and they withdrew across the Mercian border in the summer of 877 to a new base at Gloucester. A third invasion followed soon. In January 878 the Danes entered Wessex, settled at Chippenham and subjected large areas of the kingdom to their authority. With only a small following Alfred fled to the west and found refuge at Athelney in Somerset, in the marshy country of the Parrett valley. (The episode of Alfred and the cakes, first committed to writing about a century after his death, was located during the retreat at Athelney.) Had the king died at this point he would be remembered, if at all, only as a failure. But Alfred survived and prospered. During the spring of 878 he quietly mustered troops and from the fortress which he had constructed at Athelney he waged guerilla war upon the Danes. By May he was ready to challenge them openly. He advanced eastwards, gathering support from the county levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire as he went. They encountered Guthrum's army at Edington in Wiltshire and decisively defeated it, pursuing the survivors as far as their stronghold at Chippenham. After a fortnight the Danes surrendered. Their leader Guthrum was baptized a Christian in June and they swore to leave Wessex in peace, a promise which they carried out later in the year. Alfred had won the struggle for survival.

Towards the end of 884 part of a Viking army which had been campaigning in Francia crossed the Channel to Kent and laid siege to Rochester. Alfred relieved the town and eventually managed to chase the intruders back to the Continent. Guthrum's followers, settled in East Anglia since 880, had assisted the Vikings from the Continent, and it was in an attempt to neutralise them that Alfred sent a naval force against East Anglia in the summer of 885, which had mixed success, and in 886 occupied London. Shortly afterwards he made a peace-treaty with Guthrum. Apart from these events, during the fourteen years between 878 and 892 Wessex was unmolested. These were the creative years in which Alfred initiated his programme of military reform and cultural revival. In 892 the Danes returned in force and Alfred's defensive measures were put to the test. The war of 892-96 is reported at considerable length in the contemporary record of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Without following the campaigns in detail we may say that once more the Danish strategy rested upon the occupation of bases from which raids could be launched. However, there were contrasts with the earlier crises of 870-71 and 875-78. Whereas the earlier invaders had repeatedly penetrated into the heart of Alfred's kingdom (e.g. Wilton 871, Wareham 876) those of 892-96 got into Wessex only once, in 893. Whereas the earlier invaders had won victory after victory, particularly in the years 870-71, the Danes who broke into Wessex in 893 were defeated by the king's son Edward at Fareham before they had got very far. Furthermore, although the Danes were difficult to pin down and bring to battle, the English forces could on occasion do this. They matched the mobility of the Danes, pursuing them right up the valley of the Severn in 893. They could dislodge them from their bases, as at Chester in 894 and in the valley of the river Lea near London in 895. They could sometimes corner and defeat them, as ealdorman Ethelred of Mercia, Alfred's son-in-law, did at Buttington in 893. They could also by now engage the Danes by sea as well as on land, as in 896, with at least fair success. By the summer of 896 the Danish leaders had realised that Wessex was too well-defended for them. Their army dispersed, some to East Anglia or Northumbria, some to further campa