"The first sight of the Danes is as if the hand of the dial of history had gone back three hundred years. The same Norwegian fiords, the same Frisian sandbanks, pour forth their pirate fleets as in the days of Hengest and Cerdic. There is the same wild panic as the black boats of the invaders strike inland along the river reaches, or moor round the river islets, the same sights of horror--firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place--as when the English invaders attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden, for the Danes were still heathen. Letters, arts, religion, governments disappeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of old. But when the wild burst of the storm was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England still remained England; the Danes sank quietly into the mass of those around them; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The secret of this difference between the two invasions was that the battle was no longer between men of different races. It was no longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishmen and Welshmen. The Danes were the same people in blood and speech with the people they attacked; and were in fact Englishmen bringing back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the Northmen with their foes was nowhere so peaceful and complete." [Illustration: MAP 3.] The chief Danish ravages for nearly a century were confined to the southern coast and the coast of East Anglia. In 855, the Chronicle says--"The heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey." In 867, it records that "this year the Danish army went from East Anglia over the mouth of the Humber to York, in North-humbria. And there was much dissention among that people, and they had cast out their king Osbert, and had taken to themselves a king, Ælla, not of royal blood; but late in the year they resolved that they would fight against the army, and therefore they gathered a large force, and fought the army at the town of York, and stormed the town, and some of them got within and there was an excessive slaughter made of the North-humbrians, some within, some without, and the kings were both slain, and the remainder made peace with the army."