From this description it is clear that the raven flag was attached by one side to a staff, instead of by the top to a crosspiece like the Roman vexillum. We meet with it next at the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Danish hordes again invaded England under Sweyn and Cnut and conquered it. The anonymous author of the _Encomium_ of Queen Emma, the wife of Cnut, gives a description of the flag and attributes to it magical properties, in which he is good enough not to expect his readers to believe. He says: For they had a flag of wondrous portent, which, though I may well believe this to be incredible to the reader, yet because it is true I will mention it in this truthful account. Of a truth, although it was woven of quite plain white silk and there was no image of any kind in it, yet in time of war there always appeared in it a raven, as though it were woven thereon, which when its own party was victorious appeared with open beak, shaking its wings and moving its legs, but when that party was defeated, very quiet and with its whole body hanging down (_toto corpore demissus_)[70]. Possibly this flag was triangular, for in the early years of the tenth century the viking kings of Northumbria introduced into the reverse of their coins a triangular flag affixed laterally to a staff[71]. The top edge of this was horizontal and the lower, which was inclined upward from the staff, was heavily fringed. In the field was a small cross, which had--possibly under the influence of a nominal christianity--replaced the raven, although that bird is found on the obverse of some of the later coins[72]. These coins are of especial interest to us as they contain the earliest representation of a flag of any of the northern nations. This triangular flag appears first in a coin of Sihtric, who, after being driven from Dublin by the Irish in 920, reigned at York and died about 927, and later in a coin of Regnald (King of Northumbria in 943) and upon coins of Anlaf (949-952)[73]. It is about this period that flags first become associated with particular saints. Among the treasures sent by Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks, to King Æthelstan in 927 was a banner of St Maurice, which is said to have been of especial assistance to Charlemagne in his Spanish wars[74]. We do not know what form this banner took, presumably it was a representation of the saint, but it is of especial significance to us that this saint had been a soldier, for it enables us in some measure to understand why St George had such an extraordinary vogue a few centuries later. At the battle of Assandune (1016) in which the English under Eadmund Ironside were defeated by the Danes under Sweyn and Cnut, the Raven was opposed to the Dragon and to another ensign described as a "Standard." This is the first occasion on which an English king appears in the field with two different "standards," and it is of interest to note that his place in battle was between them[75].