h Ceolwulf, just noting that a year or two later his
pagan lords seem to have found much of the spoil of monasteries, and the
pickings of earl and churl, of folkland and bookland, sticking to his
fingers, instead of finding its way to their coffers. This was far from
their meaning in setting him up in the high places of Mercia. So they
strip him and thrust him out, and he dies in beggary.

This, then, is the winter's work of the great pagan army at Repton,
Alfred watching them and their work doubtless with keen eye--not without
misgivings too at their numbers, swollen again to terrible proportions
since they sailed away down Thames after Wilton fight. It will take
years yet before the gaps in the fighting strength of Wessex, left by
those nine pitched battles, and other smaller fights, will be filled by
the crop of youths passing from childhood to manhood. An anxious
thought, that, for a young king.

The pagans, however, are not yet ready for another throw for Wessex; and
so when Mercia is sucked dry for the present, and will no longer
suitably maintain so great a host, they again sever. Halfdene, who would
seem to have joined them recently, takes a large part of the army away
with him northward. Settling his head-quarters by the river Tyne, he
subdues all the land, and "ofttimes spoils the Picts and the Strathclyde
Britons." Among other holy places in those parts, Halfdene visits the
Isle of Lindisfarne, hoping perhaps in his pagan soul not only to commit
ordinary sacrilege in the holy places there, which is every-day work for
the like of him, but even to lay impious hands on, and to treat with
indignity, the remains of that holy man St. Cuthbert, who has become, in
due course, patron and guardian saint of hunters, and of that scourge of
pagans, Alfred the West Saxon. If such were his thoughts, he is
disappointed of his sacrilege; for Bishop Eardulf and Abbot
Eadred--devout and strenuous persons--having timely warning of his
approach, carry away the sainted body from Lindisfarne, and for nine
years hide with it up and down the distracted northern counties, now
here, now there, moving that sacred treasure from place to place until
this bitterness is overpast, and holy persons and things, dead or
living, are no longer in danger, and the bodies of saints may rest
safely in fixed shrines; the pagan armies and disorderly persons of all
kinds having been converted or suppressed in the mean time; for which
good deed the roya