suitably maintain so great a host, they again sever. Halfdene, who would
seem to have joined them recently, takes a large part of the army away
with him northward. Settling his head-quarters by the river Tyne, he
subdues all the land, and "ofttimes spoils the Picts and the Strathclyde
Britons." Among other holy places in those parts, Halfdene visits the
Isle of Lindisfarne, hoping perhaps in his pagan soul not only to commit
ordinary sacrilege in the holy places there, which is every-day work for
the like of him, but even to lay impious hands on, and to treat with
indignity, the remains of that holy man St. Cuthbert, who has become, in
due course, patron and guardian saint of hunters, and of that scourge of
pagans, Alfred the West Saxon. If such were his thoughts, he is
disappointed of his sacrilege; for Bishop Eardulf and Abbot
Eadred--devout and strenuous persons--having timely warning of his
approach, carry away the sainted body from Lindisfarne, and for nine
years hide with it up and down the distracted northern counties, now
here, now there, moving that sacred treasure from place to place until
this bitterness is overpast, and holy persons and things, dead or
living, are no longer in danger, and the bodies of saints may rest
safely in fixed shrines; the pagan armies and disorderly persons of all
kinds having been converted or suppressed in the mean time; for which
good deed the royal Alfred--in whose calendar St. Cuthbert, patron of
huntsmen, stands very high--will surely warmly befriend them hereafter,
when he has settled his accounts with many persons and things. From the
time of this incursion of Halfdene, Northumbria may be considered once
more a settled state, but a Danish, not a Saxon one.

The rest and greater part of the army, under Guthrum, Oskytal, and
Amund, on leaving Repton, strike southeast, through what was "Landlord"
Edmund's country, to Cambridge, where, in their usual heathen way, they
pass the winter of 875.