The crisis was indeed the gravest to which our country has ever been exposed. The Danish host was now a large and disciplined army bent on conquering and settling new lands, and already masters of the island from the Severn to the Tees. They were the fiercest and rudest of the tribes which had broken into Europe; Heathens, full of hatred and scorn for the religion, culture, arts, and civilisation of Christendom. With a real genius for war, both by sea and land, fired with the thirst of glory and adventure, they were better armed, more mobile, more martially organised than Saxon, Angle, or Jute. Short of a miracle their ultimate triumph over the whole island seemed certain. Had it been achieved, the civilisation of England would have been retarded for ages. Christianity, learning, arts, and legislation, which had progressed for two centuries, would have been stamped out, and our island would have been the seat of a barbarous and heathen horde. From the nature of their island conquest and their own mastery of the seas, they could not have been absorbed in Christendom so rapidly as were the Normans of France, or the Danubian tribes of Germany. They might have resisted for centuries both conversion and conquest from Europe. Nay more, from the supreme opportunities afforded by our island and all its resources as a basis for an imperial race, it is too probable that the heathen Danes, once firmly seated in the whole of Britain, might have proved the lasting scourge of Europe itself. From this tremendous peril, England and Europe were saved by the genius of our Saxon hero. In the Easter of that year, 878, the _Chronicle_ relates, “Alfred, with a little band, wrought a fortress at Athelney, and from that work warred on the army, with that portion of the men of Somerset that was nearest.” Athelney was a bit of firm ground in the morasses formed by the Parret and the Tone in Somersetshire. There, for a few months, the king organised a new army, drawn from Somerset and Wilts and such Hants men as were left. In May he suddenly dashed out of the wood of Selwood: “his Wessex men were rejoiced to see him”: he fought a great fight against the whole “army” at Ethandune, near Westbury, put them to flight and drove them to their camp, where, after fourteen days of siege, he forced the Danes to surrender. It was a crushing victory—the turning-point in the life of Alfred—in the life of England.