extensive estates, but this endowment by no means satisfied him, and at the very opening of the new reign he took forcible possession of the newly-built borough of Twyneham, now Christchurch in Hampshire, and also of an old British fortress, which may still be seen, at Badbury Rings near Wimborne. Driven out of these by Edward, he fled to the Yorkshire Danes, who received him as if he were a dispossessed king and offered him their allegiance, being at the moment themselves without a ruler. This led a little later to an alliance between Aethelwald and Eric, King of East Anglia, who had succeeded Guthrum in 890, and the two together, imitating the strategy of Halfdene thirty years before, marched their forces across the Chiltern country to Cricklade on the Upper Thames with the intention of raiding Wiltshire. This invasion met with little effective opposition from Duke Aethelred of Mercia through whose territories it passed, but Edward replied by a bold counterstroke, sending a force from Kent to join the Mercians of London with orders to attack the Danish districts between the river Lee and the river Ouse. The news that the ealdormen of East and West Kent, Sigwulf and Sighelm, were ravaging between the Ouse and the well-known dykes which form such a feature in East Cambridgeshire, soon compelled Aethelwald and Eric to retrace their steps, and this led to a fierce encounter between the two armies at Holme, a hamlet of Biggleswade in Bedfordshire[1]. The English accounts admit that the Danes won the day, but their victory was a hollow one. Both Aethelwald and Eric were killed, and another Guthrum became king of East Anglia, who almost immediately afterwards made a peace[2] at Yttingaford, in the township of Linslade in Buckinghamshire, on the terms that the old treaty between Alfred and Guthrum of 886 should be reconfirmed and that the Danes, in the dioceses of London and Dorchester, should abjure heathendom and pay tithes and other church dues to the bishops.
This campaign not only rid Wessex of a dangerous aetheling but convinced the Danes that Edward and Aethelred were firm in their alliance, and that it was no safe matter to attack them. The result was a period of peace for Wessex, during which Edward shewed himself no unworthy follower of Alfred as a civil ruler. His first care was to finish his father's new minster at Winchester, known in later days as the Abbey of Hyde, and organise it as a college of clerks; and thither, as soon as the church was finished, he removed Alfred's tomb. Much more important however was a scheme, pressed upon him by Archbishop Plegmund, for increasing the number of the West Saxon sees. This was ultimately carried through in 909 on the deaths of Denewulf and
- ↑ The site of this battle has not hitherto been identified, though the hamlet of Holme figures in Domesday Book in seven entries and lies just in the required position on the old North Road.
- ↑ Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen, pp. 128-135. This undated document is not the actual treaty, but seems to embody its provisions.
