Almost every year of Ethelwulf’s reign has its annal in the Chronicle, telling of Danish ravages. The storm beat most persistently on Wessex. Southampton (840), Portland (840), Charmouth (843), the mouth of the Parret (848), Wembury (?) (854), were all scenes of battle with the Danes, generally, but not always, disastrous for the English. The other parts of the country did not escape unharmed. In 841 Lindsey, East Anglia and Kent saw widespread slaughter. In 844 Redwulf, King of Northumbria, met his death at the hands of the invaders. In 851, three hundred and fifty ships came to the mouth of the Thames; their crews took Canterbury and London by storm, and put to flight the king of the Mercians who had advanced to meet them. There, however, their success ended. Crossing the Thames into Surrey, they were met by Ethelwulf and his eldest son Ethelbald leading the West Saxon _fyrd_. Battle was joined at Ockley, on the edge of the chalk downs which look into the adjoining county of Sussex, and there the West Saxon king in the words of the Chronicle, “made the greatest slaughter among the heathen army that we have heard of till this present day, and there gained the victory”. However complete the victory of Ockley might be, its importance is much diminished by the entry which precedes it in the Chronicle: “And the heathen men for the first time took up their quarters over winter in Thanet”. We thus enter on the second of the above-mentioned periods--the stage of settlement, that in which the Danes came to England, not merely to plunder and then depart, but to fix their abode permanently in the country. This choice of Thanet as their winter quarters must, to the men of Kent who knew anything of the history of their ancestors, have seemed an ominous recurrence to the strategy of Hengest and Horsa four centuries previously. There was trouble also from an older enemy. The men of Wales were now governed by one of the greatest of their early kings, Rhodri Mawr (Roderick the Great, 844–77); and it seems that the distress of the Saxons under the Danish attacks gave the Welsh courage to rise against the traditional enemies of their race. In 853 Burhred, King of Mercia, acting by the advice of his _witan_, made formal application to Ethelwulf for help against “the men of North Wales”. The very fact that such an application was needed, and that it came from the king and council of the Mercian realm, shows how far England was from having yet attained to that complete unity which has been incorrectly associated with the name of Egbert. However, the expedition which Ethelwulf now undertook against the Cymri, in alliance with Mercia, seems to have been successful, and the marriage of Burhred to Ethelwulf’s daughter, celebrated at Easter-tide, doubtless cemented the alliance and may have been a step towards federation.