The years 840-880 were the darkest period in the dismal century of the Viking raids. Neither in England nor on the Continent had there been found any effective way of resisting the invaders, nor any great warrior who could inspire his subject with the energy and courage that was needed to face the ever-growing evil. Kings like Ethelwulf or Charles the Bald, however good their intentions, were wholly inadequate to the task. Their warlike sons, Louis III., the victor of Saucourt, and Ethelred, the victor of Ashdown, were cut off in the prime of their years, just when they were beginning to win themselves a name. The Danes went where they would, no longer taking to their ships when the national levy came out against them, but stockading a camp and defying the owners of the soil to evict them from it. Almost always the assaults made on these strongholds ended in disastrous failures: it is hard to say whether the repulse of Charles the Bald at Givald’s Foss (852), of Ethelred at Reading (871), or of Charles the Fat at Ashloh (882), was the more heart-breaking to the landsfolk. It seemed impossible to burst through the bristling line of stakes and ditch manned by the veteran axemen of the heathen bands. The fact was that the rank and file of the Viking hosts were individually superior to the peasant-levies that strove to overwhelm them. In a Frankish or an English army only counts and aldermen, thegns and wealthy vassals, wore the steel helm and the ring-mail byrnie: the masses that followed them to the field had no more than spear and shield, possessing no defensive armour whatever. The Vikings, on the other hand, were professional fighting-men, armed not only with the “war-nets” that their own smiths could make, but with the spoils of a hundred victorious fights. It was no wonder that they could hold out against very superior numbers of the raw, half-armed militia of the English _Fyrd_ and the Frankish _Ban_. In the ages when personal skill with axe and sword and trained agility of body counted for so much, one practised warrior was worth two farmers fresh from the plough. It required a vast preponderance of force, or a very skilled and fortunate leader, to enable the Christian host to inflict a really crushing defeat on the invaders.