Alfred, besides remodelling his army, set up fortresses along his borders, and constructed a fleet; and, because he believed that no great nation can be built on war alone, he made wise laws and appointed judges, like Charlemagne’s _Missi_, to see that they were carried out. He also founded schools and tried, by translating books himself and inviting scholars to his court, to teach the men around him the glories and interests of peace. Amongst the books that he chose to set before his people in the Anglo-Saxon tongue was one called _Pastoral Care_, by the Pope Gregory who had wished to go to England as a missionary, and _The Consolations of Philosophy_, written by Boethius in prison.[4] ‘I have desired,’ said Alfred the Great, summing up his ideal of life, ‘to leave to the men who come after me my memory in good works’; and English people to-day, descendants of both Anglo-Saxons and their Danish foes, remember with pride and affection this ‘Wise King’, this ‘Truth-teller’, this ‘England’s darling’, as he was called in his own day, who like Charlemagne believed in patriotism, justice, and knowledge. For three-quarters of a century after Alfred’s death his descendants kept alive something at any rate of this spirit of greatness, but in 978 there succeeded to the crown a boy of ten called Ethelred, who as he grew up earned for himself the nickname of ‘rede-less’ or ‘man without advice’. It is only fair before condemning Ethelred’s conduct to point out the heavy difficulties with which he was faced; both the renewed Danish attacks on his shores, and also the jealousies and feuds of his own nobles, the Earls, or ‘Ealdormen’, who had carved out large estates for themselves that they ruled as petty kings. Even a statesman like Alfred would have needed all his strength and tact to unite these powerful subjects under one banner in order to lead them against the invaders. Ethelred proved himself weak and without any power of leadership. The policy for which he has been chiefly remembered is his levy of a tax called ‘Danegeld’, or Danish gold, the sums of money that he raised from his reluctant subjects to pay the Danes to go away. As a wiser man would have realized, this really meant that he paid them to return in still larger numbers in order to obtain more money. At last, alarmed at the result of this policy, he did something still more short-sighted and less defensible: he ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in the kingdom. The Massacre of St. Brice’s Day, as this drastic measure is usually called, brought on England a bitter revenge at the hands of the angry Vikings. One well-armed force after another landed on the coasts, combining in an attack on the Anglo-Saxon King that drove him from the country to seek refuge in France. Very shortly afterwards he died, and Cnut, one of the Danish leaders, forced the country to accept him as her ruler.