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 seemed impossible for the Saxons to collect an army in less than a month, or to keep it in the field when collected. Long before the English ‘host’ was ready to fight, the pirates had harried the land and disappeared. At last Alfred the Great (871-901), grandson of Egbert, began to turn the tide against the invaders. He defended Wessex all along the line of the Upper Thames, in battle after desperate battle, and at last beat a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire. The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a Christian, and was allowed to settle with his men in North-Eastern England. Soon after that we find English and ‘settled’ Danes fighting valiantly for their country against fresh bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred the first real ‘King of England’; he picked up the threads of the national life which the Danes had cut to pieces. He translated good books into the Saxon tongue; he started the great history of England, called the ‘Chronicle’, which was kept year by year, in more than one monastery, down to 1154. He and his son, Edward, and his grandsons, Athelstan and Edmund, built fleets and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled them to fight in their own defence. For some years every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception, and every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten down. King Edgar, 959–75, was called ‘the peaceful’, and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river Dee by six lesser Kings.

It was a brief respite,

and in the reign of Edgar's foolish son, Ethelred the