and even accidental
about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his early life
lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, and
readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of
all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of
persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would
bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with no
ambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple,
concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which he
piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.

He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph
and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a
lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards those
wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been
driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that are
his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned
with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the
broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; and
in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp
of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as
successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was
successful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the
conqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here penned
behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish
conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty of
Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at
the baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of the treaty.
In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly
wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the
religious element in this part of English history, for without it there
would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could
clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that
followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than the
Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such
did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute was
really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did not
get rid of th