But the worst of the panic only lasted a few weeks: before Easter the men of Devonshire rallied and cut to pieces at Kenwith the army from South Wales, slaying its leaders, Ingwar and Hubba, and 1200 of their followers, and capturing their famous Raven standard. Somewhat later the levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire assembled in the forest of Selwood under the king in person and marched against the Danish camp at Chippenham. The invaders, thinking they were strong enough to fight in the open, moved out to Eddington to meet the advancing English. There they were routed in a battle of which we know no details, save that the king’s men fought in one dense mass—not in two, as at Ashdown—and that the fight was long and desperate. The defeated host fled to its stronghold at Chippenham, on the east bank of the Avon. Alfred followed hard upon them, and, pushing up to the very gates of the stockade, built a camp almost in actual touch with it, so as to make any sortie well-nigh impossible. The Danes were quite unprepared for a siege; they had fondly imagined that Wessex was their own, and had accumulated no stores. In fourteen days they were starved out, and concluded with the king the famous pact which is often, but inaccurately, called the Peace of Wedmore. King Guthrum and thirty of his chiefs consented to receive baptism, did homage to Alfred, and undertook to withdraw from his realm and to trouble him no more. These conditions, it is surprising to find, were punctually fulfilled; the Viking became a Christian, and withdrew his host first to Cirencester in Mercia and then to East Anglia, where they all settled down and gave no trouble for some years. A great fleet which had come up the Thames as far as Fulham, and had been harassing Kent and Western Wessex, lingered some months after Guthrum’s defeat, but gave up its enterprise in the spring of 879, sailed off eastwards, and set itself to ravage Flanders.