The hour was one of direst need; for all England lay spent and gasping beneath the bloodstained feet of the heathen pirates. But, with the need, there arose the deliverer. In 871, the year after the sack of Ely, Alfred the Great, "England's darling," succeeded to the kingship of the exhausted realm; and the life and death struggle entered on its last and most desperate phase. For one moment even he seemed to go under, and was driven to an outlaw life in the marshes of Athelney; the next, we see him shattering the invaders by his miraculous victory of Ethandune, and, with incomparable state-craft, negotiating that Peace of Wedmore, whereby the Danes had to acknowledge him as their Overlord. As such, he shortly established a College of Priests at Ely. Eight of the clerics who had witnessed the sack of the monastery came back to their old home, and rebuilt a part of the church that it might serve again as a place of worship. These priests were not monks, and are said to have had wives and children. They lived in poverty; for all the endowments of the Abbey had been seized by Burgraed, the last King of Mercia. But gradually, as the children of Alfred won back the kingdom, the endowment of Ely began afresh. Here a fishery, and there a wood, and again a mill with adjoining pastures, was bestowed on the little College--a term which still clings to the Cathedral precincts of Ely, called to this day the College, not the Close as in most Cathedral cities. With the accession, in 958, of the great Edgar, the first English King to be Emperor of all Britain, the monarch who, nearly a thousand years ago, gained for himself, as but one of our kings has done since, the title of "Peacemaker," brighter days dawned. Then, as now, the Catholic Church might have been well called "Cette eternelle recommenceuse," able to rise from her ashes with life renewed. From the havoc wrought by the Danes, the Abbey of Ely, as a Benedictine House, arose once more, rebuilt, refounded, and re-endowed by King Edgar, who restored to it by Royal Charter all that Etheldreda had originally bestowed; adding thereto several demesnes and sundry privileges. The re-constitution of the Abbey was carried out under the guidance of Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester. The monks were thus restored; but the nuns of Ely have disappeared from view. As for those secular priests who were in possession and had maintained the sacred character of the spot for well-nigh a hundred years, ever since its devastation by the Danes, they were allowed to stay on if they submitted to the Benedictine Rule, otherwise they were dismissed.