them, made their last unavailing stand.

For a while they had been lords of all England. The Anglo-Saxon race was
wearing out. The men of Wessex, priest-ridden, and enslaved by their own
aristocracy, quailed before the free Norsemen, among whom was not a single
serf. The God-descended line of Cerdic and Alfred was worn out. Vain,
incapable, profligate kings, the tools of such prelates as Odo and
Dunstan, were no match for such wild heroes as Thorkill the tall, or Olaf
Trygvasson, or Swend Forkbeard. The Danes had gradually colonized, not
only their own Danelagh and Northumbria, but great part of Wessex. Vast
sums of Danegelt were yearly sent out of the country to buy off the fresh
invasions which were perpetually threatened. Then Ethelred the Unready,
Ethelred Evil-counsel, advised himself to fulfil his name, and the curse
which Dunstan had pronounced against him at the baptismal font. By his
counsel the men of Wessex rose against the unsuspecting Danes, and on St.
Brice's eve, A. D. 1002, murdered them all with tortures, man, woman, and
child. It may be that they only did to the children as the fathers had
done to them: but the deed was "worse than a crime; it was a mistake." The
Danes of the Danelagh and of Northumbria, their brothers of Denmark and
Norway, the Orkneys and the east coast of Ireland, remained unharmed. A
mighty host of Vikings poured from thence into England the very next year,
under Swend Forkbeard and the great Canute; and after thirteen fearful
campaigns came the great battle of Assingdown in Essex, where "Canute had
the victory; and all the English nation fought against him, and all the
nobility of the English race was there destroyed."

That same year saw the mysterious death of Edmund Ironside, the last man
of Cerdic's race worthy of the name. For the next twenty-five years,
Danish kings ruled from the Forth to the Land's End.