The fourteen years which followed the Peace of Wedmore (878 to 892) were, as has been said, in the main years of peace, and may be considered to justify the heading of this chapter; yet that peace was not all unbroken, nor was Alfred’s Danish godson always a placid and peaceful Christian. There were still some slight heavings of the barbarian sea, which must be shortly described before we turn to the much more interesting subject of Alfred’s peaceful labours. The main condition of the Peace of Wedmore was that the Danes should evacuate Wessex. The agreement that the Watling Street should be the boundary between the two nations cannot be stated to have been one of the conditions of the peace now concluded. We have, in fact, no accurate information as to the territorial arrangements of 878. The extremely interesting document called _Aelfredes and Guthrumes Frith_ (the peace of Alfred and Guthrum) must belong to some later year than the meeting at Wedmore, and the course of the history seems to justify us in assigning it to the year 885 or thereabouts.[136] After Guthrum and his men had lingered for some time in the neighbourhood of Cirencester, they marched across England to East Anglia (879), and made a permanent settlement there, “occupying and dividing the land”. This probably means that they exchanged the destructive excitement of the life of the viking for the peaceful existence of the husbandman. But when, five years later, in 884, a division of “the army” which had been ravaging Gaul came to Kent and besieged Rochester, the sight of their fellow-countrymen, harrying on the other side of the Thames estuary, seems to have been too much for Danish self-control. Guthrum “broke peace with King Alfred,” and probably sent some of his men to help in the siege. Alfred, however, set to work to besiege the besiegers, who had “wrought another fastness round themselves,” and in the end forced them to abandon their enterprise, leave their horses as the prize of victory, and depart over seas. He then proceeded to chastise the East Anglian Danes for their breach of faith, sending a fleet against them from Kent which won a signal victory. Notwithstanding a subsequent defeat, his operations must have been on the whole successful, for he rescued London from the Danish yoke and concluded, probably in 885, that treaty with Guthrum which as before said is still extant, bearing the title of Alfred’s and Guthrum’s _frith_.