success came luxury, drunkenness, envy, quarrelsomeness, falsehood, all the signs of a demoralised people. And then for the punishment of the nation came first a pestilence so terrible that the living scarcely sufficed to bury the dead, and then, direst plague of all, the fatal resolution to call in foreign aid. “A rumour was spread that their inveterate enemies were moving for their utter extermination. A council was called to consider the best means of repelling their fatal and oft-repeated invasions and ravages. Then all the councillors, together with the proud tyrant,[33] with blinded souls, devised this defence (say rather ruin) for their country, that those most ferocious and ill-famed Saxons--a race hateful to God and man--should be invited into the island (as one might ‘invite’ a wolf into the sheepfold) in order to beat back the northern natives. Never was a step taken more ruinous or more bitter than this. Oh, the depth of these men’s blindness! Oh, the desperate and foolish dulness of their minds! ‘Foolish are the princes of Zoan, giving unto Pharaoh senseless counsel.’[34] Then that horde of cubs burst forth from the den of their mother, the lioness, in three _cyuls_ (keels), as their language calls them, or as we should say, ‘long-ships’. They relied on favourable omens and on a certain prophecy which had been made to them, in which it was predicted that for 300 years they should occupy the land towards which their prows were pointed, and for half of that time they should lay it waste by frequent ravages. Thus, at the bidding of that unlucky tyrant did they first fix their terrible claws into the eastern part of the island, pretending that they were going to fight for the deliverance of the country, but in truth intending to capture it for themselves. Then the aforesaid mother-lioness, learning how the first brood had prospered, sent another and more numerous array of her cubs, who, borne hither in barks, joined themselves to these treacherous allies.”