k upon the
entrenchments, which must ere long surrender from famine. There was no
risk of reinforcements arriving to relieve the Danes. Guthorn had led
to the battle the whole fighting force of the Danes in Wessex and East
Anglia. This was far smaller than it would have been a year earlier;
but the Northmen, having once completed their work of pillage, soon
turned to fresh fields of adventure. Those whose disposition led them
to prefer a quiet life had settled upon the land from which they had
dispossessed the Saxons; but the principal bands of rovers, finding
that England was exhausted and that no more plunder could be had, had
either gone back to enjoy at home the booty they had gained, or had
sailed to harry the shores of France, Spain, and Italy.

Thus the position of the Danes in Chippenham was desperate, and at the
end of fourteen days, by which time they were reduced to an extremity
by hunger, they sent messengers into the royal camp offering their
submission. They promised if spared to quit the kingdom with all speed,
and to observe this contract more faithfully than those which they had
hitherto made and broken. They offered the king as many hostages as he
might wish to take for the fulfilment of their promises. The haggard
and emaciated condition of those who came out to treat moved Alfred to
pity.

So weakened were they by famine that they could scarce drag themselves
along. It would have been easy for the Saxons to have slain them to the
last man; and the majority of the Saxons, smarting under the memory of
the cruel oppression which they had suffered, the destruction of home
and property, and the slaughter of friends and relations, would fain
have exterminated their foes. King Alfred, however, thought otherwise.

Guthorn and the Danes had effected a firm settlement in East Anglia,
and lived at amity with the Saxons there. They had, it is true, wrested
from them the greatest portion of their lands. Still peace and order
were now established. The Saxons were allowed liberty and equal rights.
Intermarriages were taking place, and the two peoples were becoming
welded into one. Alfred then considered that it would be well to have
the king of this country as an ally; he and his settled people would
soon be as hostile to further incursions of the Northmen as were the
Saxons themselves, and their interests and those of Wessex would be
identical.

Did he, on the other hand, carry out a general massacre of the Da