The Danes were now so spread over the whole of England, that the Danish invaders were sure of finding support in almost every corner of it; and Ethelred consequently saw that, if their power was not crushed at once, the Anglo-Saxon dominion was threatened with imminent ruin. But it was too late. The secret massacre planned by him in the year 1002 was far from sufficing to annihilate, even in South England, the numerous traces of Danish influence; and to North England, as is well known, it did not extend. Even after the slaughter, we continue to find in the royal letters-patent nearly the same Scandinavian names of chiefs as before: such as Siward, Styr, Ulfkytel, Nordman, and the knights Ulfkytel and Thurkytel. The Icelandic scald, or bard, Gunlaug Ormstunge, also remained some time afterwards with Ethelred, just as Egil Skallegrimsen had before resided at the court of King Edgar, a monarch favourably disposed towards the Danes. The old chronicles also mention a powerful chief of Danish extraction who was in Ethelred’s army after the massacre. This was Thorketil, surnamed Myrehoved (Ant-head); and, according to the same chronicles, a Dane named Ulfketil Snilling, sheriff or earl in East Anglia, was even married to Ethelred’s own daughter Ulfhilde! Thus, even before the conquest by Canute the Great, Danish families had frequently ingrafted themselves on the families of the Anglo-Saxon nobility; nay, even on the royal family itself. After that conquest the line of demarcation between the Danes and Anglo-Saxons cannot have been so strongly drawn as is generally imagined. Thus the descriptions given in the Sagas of the bold chiefs of the heathen North, as being also shrewd, amiable, and eloquent men, gain more and more credibility; and we cannot help admiring the ability and manliness which enabled the heathen Danish chiefs, and their immediate Christian successors, to maintain their difficult position against a hostile aristocracy, and, in spite of it, gradually to extend their power in the very midst of Anglo-Saxon England. Nay, they not only maintained their ground as the equals of the Anglo-Saxons, but soon became their superiors. The weakness and depravity of the Anglo-Saxon nobles under the reign of Ethelred were the best proof that their day was past. Faintheartedness, bordering very closely on cowardice, want of union, treachery, and every other vice, reigned no less among the chiefs than among their dependents. Luxury and effeminacy had usurped the place of the old Anglo-Saxon simplicity and vigour. Scarcely any great men appeared among them, notwithstanding the urgent need that there was for such characters. Even the greatest of their few warriors, Edmund Ironsides, was, as we have seen, of Danish descent on the mother’s side.