stout ones"; nor to Bromton's,[1] that it comprised four thousand; not to Matthew of Westminster's,[2] that it was four thousand eight hundred strong; but we may well believe an assertion which is made in substance by more than one writer, that, during his sixteen years' reign, no thief was found in his realm on shore, and no pirate heard of in the surrounding seas. Under him, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy in England reached its highest pitch of power. When the hand of Edgar was relaxed by death, the fabric which Alfred and his successors had so laboriously created collapsed with startling rapidity.
Edward the Martyr never reached manhood, and in his name the land was governed by weak women and self-seeking priests. Ethelred the Purposeless was also, during great part of his reign, in the same hands. In Edgar, one strong man had stood for the nation. Babies, fainéants, and women could not take Edgar's place; and there was no national life to carry on his work. All became confusion. Six years after the death of Edgar, the Danes[3] did as they liked in the narrow seas; and by 991 the spirit of the country was so crushed that Ethelred agreed to buy off the free-booters with an annual tribute of ten thousand pounds, which was raised, under the name of Danegeld,[4] by a tax of two shillings[5] per hide on land.
It was then that Edgar's mild unwisdom bore fruit. The Danes contemptuously accepted the tribute; but, holding a strong position in that part of the country known as the Danelagh, where the inhabitants were largely of Danish blood, and still full of Scandinavian sympathies; and despising a race which thus ignobly confessed its inability to defend itself, they did not for one moment desist from their course of raid and rapine. England had corrupted its once hardy Saxon conquerors, who were no longer a match for Norse pirates, led by men who never slept beneath a raftered roof, and never sat down to drink by a sheltered hearth. The Danish scourge was needed to do for the Saxons what the Saxon scourge had done for the Britons; but it was none the less terrible while it was being applied. Ethelred bought off one viking only to find
