handune. There has been much doubt among the antiquaries
as to the site of Ethandune, but Dr. Giles and others have at length
established the claims of Edington, a village seven miles from Clay
hill, on the northeast, to the spot where the strength of the second
wave of pagan invasion was utterly broken and rolled back weak and
helpless from the rock of the West Saxon kingdom.

Sir John Spelman, relying apparently only on the authority of Nicholas
Harpesfeld's _Ecclesiastical History of England_, puts a speech into
Alfred's mouth, which he is supposed to have delivered before the battle
of Edington. He tells them that the great sufferings of the land had
been yet far short of what their sins had deserved. That God had only
dealt with them as a loving Father, and was now about to succor them,
having already stricken their foe with fear and astonishment, and given
him, on the other hand, much encouragement by dreams and otherwise. That
they had to do with pirates and robbers, who had broken faith with them
over and over again; and the issue they had to try that day was whether
Christ's faith or heathenism was henceforth to be established in
England.

There is no trace of any such speech in the _Saxon Chronicle_ or Asser,
and the one reported does not ring like that of Judas Maccabaeus. That
Alfred's soul was on fire that morning, on finding himself once more at
the head of a force he could rely on, and before the enemy he had met so
often, we may be sure enough, but shall never know how the fire kindled
into speech, if indeed it did so at all. In such supreme moments many of
the strongest men have no word to say--keep all their heat within.

Nor have we any clew to the numbers who fought on either side at
Ethandune, or indeed in any of Alfred's battles. In the _Chronicles_
there are only a few vague and general statements, from which little can
be gathered. The most precise of them is that in the _Saxon Chronicle_,
which gives eight hundred and forty as the number of men who were slain,
as we heard, with Hubba before Cynuit fort, in Devonshire, earlier in
this same year. Such a death-roll, in an action in which only a small
detachment of the pagan army was engaged, would lead to the conclusion
that the armies were far larger than one would expect. On the other
hand, it is difficult to imagine how any large bodies of men could find
subsistence in a small country, which was the seat of so devastating a
war, and in which s