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 pirate or not, against their conquerors. They hated the Danes, but they hated the Saxons more; and when, not long after Offa's death, another Danish foraying party landed in Northumbria, it met with assistance from the dissatisfied Britons. Nor were the Danes effectively withstood again until the question of supremacy among the Saxon kingdoms had been finally decided by the victories of Wessex under Egbert.

But even Egbert, the wise monarch of a more or less consolidated England, was able to make the Danes respect him only in the last few years of his life, when all domestic enemies had been silenced. While he was still building up his power, the pirates sorely troubled the fringes of the country. In 800, the year of his accession to the throne of Wessex, bodies of Danes landed twice. One party pillaged the Isle of Portland, and the other ravaged the districts in the neighborhood of the Humber but was driven off by the country people. In 801 a body landed on Lindisfarne, and having defeated the Saxons there, re-embarked, proceeded round the south coast to Wales, and joined the Britons who were still unconquered in the part of the country lying to the west of Offa's Dyke. Egbert, however, met and beat them, yet not so badly as to deter them from making a fresh descent in 802, when heavily reinforced they entered the mouth of the Thames, seized Sheppey, and ravaged parts of Kent and Essex, up to within sight of the gates of London, where Egbert again met and beat them.

These forays were repeated, sometimes with more and sometimes with less success, nearly every year, and in 833 the crews of thirty-five Danish vessels inflicted a bloody defeat upon Egbert at Charmouth. In 835, however, Egbert retaliated, coming up at Hengestesdun, now Hingston Down, with a combined horde of Danes and Cornish Britons, and nearly annihilating it.

In the following year Egbert died. Under his successor Ethelwulf the same kind of thing continued. In 837 the Danes were defeated at Southampton, but gained a success at Port in Dorsetshire. In 849, they defeated the king at Charmouth, and in 851 worse befel. Athelstan, a son of Egbert, assisted by the ealdorman Ealchere, seems to have fought a naval action with a Danish force off Sandwich, and to have defeated it, taking nine vessels; but another and much stronger Danish force, consisting of three