attempt to add Wessex itself to their possessions [878]. For a moment the land seemed conquered; Ælfred himself lay hid in the marshes of Somersetshire; men might well deem that the Empire of Ecgberht and the Kingdom of Cerdic itself, had vanished for ever. But the strong heart of the most renowned of Englishmen, the saint, the scholar, the hero, and the lawgiver, carried his people safely through this most terrible of dangers. Within the same year the Dragon of Wessex was again victorious [at the battle of Ethandun, or Edington], and the Northmen were driven to conclude a peace which Englishmen, fifty years sooner, would have deemed the lowest depth of degradation, but which might now be fairly looked upon as honourable and even as triumphant. By the terms of the Peace of Wedmore the Northmen were to evacuate Wessex and the part of Mercia south-west of Watling-Street; they, or at least their chiefs, were to submit to baptism, and they were to receive the whole land beyond Watling-Street as vassals of the West-Saxon King. ... The exact boundary started from the Thames, along the Lea to its source, then right to Bedford and along the Ouse till it meets Watling-Street, then along Watling-Street to the Welsh border. See Ælfred and Guthrum's Peace,' Thorpe's 'Laws and Institutes,' i. 152. This frontier gives London to the English; but it seems that Ælfred did not obtain full possession of London till 886." {786} The territory thus conceded to the Danes, which included all northeastern England from the Thames to the Tyne, was thenceforth known by the name of the Danelagh or Danelaw, signifying the country subject to the law of the Danes. The Peace of Wedmore ended the second period of the Danish invasions. The third period, which was not opened until a full century later, embraced the actual conquest of the whole of England by a Danish king and its temporary annexation to the dominions of the Danish crown. _E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest of England, chapter 2, with foot-note._