he then openly deserted to
Canute with forty vessels. [MN 1015.]

Notwithstanding this misfortune, Edmond was not disconcerted; but,
assembling all the force of England, was in a condition to give battle
to the enemy. The king had had such frequent experience of perfidy
among his subjects, that he had lost all confidence in them: he
remained at London, pretending sickness, but really from apprehensions
that they intended to buy their peace, by delivering him into the
hands of his enemies. The army called aloud for their sovereign to
march at their head against the Danes; and, on his refusal to take the
field, they were so discouraged, that those vast preparations became
ineffectual for the defence of the kingdom. Edmond, deprived of all
regular supplies to maintain his soldiers, was obliged to commit equal
ravages with those which were practised by the Danes; and after making
some fruitless expeditions into the north, which had submitted
entirely to Canute's power, he retired to London, determined there to
maintain, to the last extremity, the small remains of English liberty.
[MN 1016.] He here found every thing in confusion by the death of the
king, who expired after an unhappy and inglorious reign of thirty-five
years. He left two sons by his first marriage, Edmond, who succeeded
him, and Edwy, whom Canute afterwards murdered. His two sons by the
second marriage, Alfred and Edward, were immediately, upon Ethelred's
death, conveyed into Normandy by Queen Emma.

[MN Edmond Ironside.]
This prince, who received the name of Ironside from his hardy valour,
possessed courage and abilities sufficient to have prevented his
country from sinking into those calamities, but not to raise it from
that abyss of misery into which it had already fallen. Among the
other misfortunes of the English, treachery and disaffection had crept
in among the nobility and prelates; and Edmond found no better
expedient for stopping the farther progress of these fatal evils, than
to lead his army instantly into the field, and to employ them against
the common enemy. After meeting with some success at Gillingham, he
prepared himself to decide, in one general engagement, the fate of his
crown; and at Scoerston, in the county of Gloucester, he offered
battle to the enemy, who were commanded by Canute and Edric. Fortune,
in the beginning of the day, declared for him; but Edric, having cut
off the head of one Osmer, whose countenance resembled