Things had come to such a point that the Anglo-Saxon community seemed inevitably devoted to the same ruin which had overtaken first the Britons and then the Romans, they seemed doomed to make way for another reconstruction. Britain would have become an outpost of the restored heathenism, which could then have been with difficulty repulsed from the Eastern and Western Frankish empires, afflicted as they were by similar attacks, and governed by the discordant and weak princes who then ruled them. At this moment of peril King Alfred appeared. It was not merely for his own interests, nor merely for those of England, but for those of the world, that he fought. He is rightly called 'the Great;' a title fairly due only to those who have maintained great universal interests, and not merely those of their own country. The distress of the moment, and the deliverance from it, have been kept in imperishable remembrance by popular sagas and church legends. It is well worth the trouble to trace out in the authenticated traditions, brief as they are, the causes that decided the event. We may state them as follows:--Since the attacks of the Vikings were especially ruinous, from their occupation of the strong places whence they could command and plunder the open country, one step in the work of liberation was taken when Alfred, for the first time, wrested from them a stronghold which they had seized, deep in the west. Then he, too, occupied strong positions, and knew how to defend them. With the bravest and most devoted of his nobles, and of the population that had not yet submitted, he established a hill-fortress on a height rising like an island out of the standing waters and marshlands in the still only slightly cultivated land of Somersetshire; this not only served him as an asylum, but also as a central point from which he too ranged through the land far and wide, like the enemy, except that his object was to guard it, and make it ring once more with the already forgotten name of the King. Around his banners gathered, with reviving courage, the population of the neighbouring districts also: the Saxons could again appear in the open field; from their advancing shield-wall the disorderly onsets of the Vikings recoiled, the victory was theirs. Hereupon, moreover, as if the decision between the two religions depended on the result of the war, the leader of the heathens came over to Christianity, and took an Anglo-Saxon name. The Danes attached themselves to the principles and the powers which they had come forth to destroy.