out from Athelney in the
disguise of a Christmas minstrel, and went into the Danish camp, and
stayed there several days, amusing the Danes with his playing, till he
had seen all he wanted, and then went back without any one finding him
out.

Now, passing on to

CHRISTMAS UNDER THE DANISH KINGS OF ENGLAND,

we find that in 961 King Edgar celebrated the Christmas
festival with great splendour at York; and in 1013 Ethelred
kept his Christmas with the brave citizens of London who had
defended the capital during a siege and stoutly resisted Swegen,
the tyrant king of the Danes. Sir Walter Scott, in his beautiful
poem of "Marmion," thus pictures the "savage Dane" keeping
the great winter festival:--

"Even, heathen yet, the savage Dane
At Iol more deep the mead did drain;
High on the beach his galleys drew,
And feasted all his pirate crew;
Then in his low and pine-built hall,
Where shields and axes deck'd the wall,
They gorged upon the half-dress'd steer;
Caroused in seas of sable beer;
While round, in brutal jest, were thrown
The half-gnaw'd rib, and marrow bone:
Or listen'd all, in grim delight.
While Scalds yell'd out the joys of fight.
Then forth, in frenzy, would they hie,
While wildly-loose their red locks fly,
And dancing round the blazing pile,
They make such barbarous mirth the while,
As best might to the mind recall
The boisterous joys of Odin's hall."

When the citizens of London saw that Swegen had succeeded all over
England except their own city, they thought it was no use holding out
any longer, and they too, submitted and gave hostages. And so Swegen
was the first Dane who was king, or (as Florence calls him) "Tyrant
over all England;" and Ethelred, sometimes called the "Unready," King
of the West Saxons, who had struggled unsuccessfully against the
Danes, fled with his wife and children to his brother-in-law's court
in Normandy. On the death of Swegen, the Danes of his fleet chose his
son Cnut to be King, but the English invited Ethelred to return from
Normandy and renew the struggle with the Danes. He did so, and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says: "He held his kingdom with great toil and
great difficulty the while that his life lasted." After his death and
that of his son Edmund, Cnut was finally elected and crowned.
Freeman,[12] in recording the event, says that: "At the Christmas of
1016-1017, Cnut was a third time chosen king over all England, and one
of the