The conqueror next moved against Northumbria, whose king Eanred did not dare to accept the offer of battle. At Dore, among the hills of North Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield, “the Northumbrians met him and offered him obedience and peace, and with that they separated the one from the other”. This transaction undoubtedly meant the acceptance of Egbert as overlord, and his supremacy was thus at last assured over the whole English portion of the island. Nor did he rest content herewith, for in the next year “he led an army against the men of North Wales and reduced them to humble” (though not permanent) “obedience”. The last four years of Egbert’s life were disturbed by the raids of the Danish invaders. For forty-one years after the raids in which the Northumbrian sanctuaries were pillaged, the Northmen seem to have left England unmolested, but during this time they had been sailing round the north of Scotland, occupying the Hebrides and grievously harrying, all but conquering, Ireland. Now in 835 Egbert, already a man advanced in years, heard the grievous tidings that “heathen men were ravaging the Isle of Sheppey”. Thus the Danes, like the Jutes four centuries earlier, began their hostile operations with one of those curious semi-islands which clustered round the coast of Kent. Sheppey, however, was higher up the estuary of the Thames than Hengest’s Isle of Thanet. Next year the Danes appeared on the coast of West Dorset. The crews of thirty-five ships appeared off Charmouth, not far from Lyme Regis. Egbert himself led his men to battle; there was a terrible slaughter, in which two bishops and two ealdormen fell, and--ominous confession of the West Saxon chronicler--“the Danes held the place of slaughter”. Still, however, we have no hint of permanent occupation. Two years later, in 838, there was a perilous combination of Northman and Celt. “A mighty fleet” [evidently Danish] “came to West Wales and they” [Danes and Cornishmen] “made an alliance to fight against Egbert. When he heard that, he went forth and fought with them at Hengestdune, and there he put to flight both Welshmen [Cornishmen] and Danes.” At Hingston Down, a high moorland overlooking the Tamar, about four miles north of the place where the great Saltash bridge now spans the creek, this important victory was won. It was the last piece of work that the old warrior accomplished. In 839 he “fared forth,” surely not without some dark forebodings of the hard struggle that lay before his descendants; and ETHELWULF his son reigned in his stead. The new king seems to have ruled in person only over the ancestral Wessex, forming the recently acquired kingdoms in the south-east of the island into a dependency, of which his brother Athelstan was made under-king.