Ethelred at first was unwilling to trust to their promises, being apprehensive of a design to deliver him into the hands of his enemies; but being encouraged by the reception met with by his son, whom he had sent before to sound the people's inclinations, he returned to England, and was welcomed with every demonstration of joy; and his subjects swore allegiance to him again, as if he had begun a new reign, his flight being considered as a sort of abdication of the crown. He, on his part, promised to reform whatever was amiss; and the eagerness of the English to throw off a foreign yoke, made them flock to the king with such zeal and haste that he soon found himself at the head of a powerful army. His first expedition plainly showed his misfortunes had made no alteration in him; for instead of marching against the Danes, he employed his forces to be revenged on the men of Lindsey--one of the three divisions of Lincolnshire; the other two being named Holland and Kesteven. The inhabitants of the first-named division, it appeared, had provided the Danes with horses, and had also offered to join them. After Ethelred had punished these traitors, he prepared to march and fight the enemy, who little expected so sudden a revolution. Although Canute was undoubtedly a great prince, and had the same forces his father Sweyn had conquered England with, he did not think fit to hazard a battle; but, on the contrary, before Ethelred was advanced near enough to oblige him to fight, he led his troops to the sea-side, and embarking them, set sail for Denmark. Before his departure, he ordered the hands, noses, and ears of the hostages he had in his power to be cut off, leaving them thus mangled on the shore. As soon as Ethelred found himself freed from the Danes, he took no heed of his promise to his subjects, but on the contrary resumed his old maxims, and imposed, on various pretences, excessive taxes, which raised much murmuring among the nobles and people. To these causes for public discontent he added others of a more private nature, which destroyed all the hopes entertained of his amendment. Morkar and Sifforth, the chief men of the five Danish boroughs, were sacrificed to his avarice. To draw these two earls into his power, the king convened the Witena-gemot at Oxford, where he caused them to be murdered, and then seized their estates, as if they had been condemned by the common forms of justice. Algitha, widow of Sifforth, was shut up in a monastery, to which circumstance she was indebted for her later good fortune; for Edmund, the king's eldest son, passing that way some time after, was desirous to see one so renowned for her beauty, and fell so desperately in love with her, that he married her even against his father's consent.