"Then drave from each hand Full starkly the spear, Showered the sharp arrows, Busy were bows, Shield met shaft, Bitter the battle." In the end the pirates are driven back to their ships, but at the cost of Brithnoth's own life. He is pierced by a spear, and sinks dying to the ground; to the last exhorting his soldiers to fight on, and commending his own soul to God in the following beautiful and touching lines: "To Thee give I thanks, Thou Lord of all living, For all good hap In this life here. Sore need I now, O Maker mild, That Thou should'st grant My spirit grace; That my soul to Thee May depart in peace, And flee to Thy keeping, Thou King of Angels. To Thee do I pray That the Gates of Hell Prevail not against me." [Illustration: _West Aisle of the North Transept, Ely._] The Danes carried off Brithnoth's head; but his body was rescued; and, according to his wish, the monks came and brought it back to Ely, where the Abbot buried it, replacing the missing head by one of wax. During the eighteenth century the skeleton was met with in the course of some excavations and recognised as Brithnoth's by the absence of the skull. It now lies in Bishop West's beautiful chapel, along with the bones of other Anglo-Saxon worthies. The Lady Elfleda, Brithnoth's widow, added largely to the benefactions he had bestowed on Ely; she gave the Abbey valuable lands within easy reach of the monastery, and she moreover presented to the church a golden chain, and a curtain worked with the most notable deeds of her husband's life. Those who have seen the Bayeux tapestry, representing the events of the life of William the Conqueror, can picture to themselves what Lady Elfleda's curtain may have been a century earlier. In the next generation (1016) a body of the monks of Ely accompanied another hero to battle against the Danes. The hero of this generation was Ethelred's son, King Edmund Ironside; the battle was the great fight of Assandun, a place impossible to locate with certainty, but not improbably situated on the south-east border of Cambridgeshire. During the last twenty-five years the Danes had become more and more daring, and now, under their great king, Canute, the mightiest of all Scandinavian monarchs, they were attempting nothing less than the organised conquest of England. Thus Canute and Edmund were face to face in a desperate struggle, and, after five indecisive battles in a single year, Edmund was defeated, on St. Luke's Day, at Assandun, and his defeat was shortly followed by his death. Canute then assumed the crown, by right of conquest, a right which he proclaimed by calling himself not, like his predecessors, "King of the English," but "King of England."