If, as there is reason to believe, the cases of conversion of folkland into bookland were frequent throughout the later Saxon centuries, if the slumbering rights of succession of distant members of the kinship were being barred by “books” granting the land to members of the royal household, to convents and churches, or simply confirming ordinary commercial transactions of sale and exchange, it is easy to see that the class of “twy-hind” ceorls would be sensibly diminished and the possessions of the “twelf-hynd” man, the thegn or the king’s retainer visibly increased. All these causes would augment the number of poor and struggling freemen who, especially in times of war and invasion during “the clash of mighty opposites,” were glad to sacrifice some part of their precarious independence by “commending” themselves to the protection of some powerful landowner. CHAPTER XVIII. ALFRED’S LAST DAYS. From the peaceful labours which had occupied him for the last seven years, Alfred was recalled to the weary work of war by tidings of the return of the dreaded _here_ to the English coast. During those seven years the chronicler had been nervously noting the deeds of “the army” beyond seas. They had been fighting chiefly in the north of Gaul, pressing up the rivers Somme, Seine and Marne, and even laying close siege for ten months (November, 885, to September, 886) to the city of Paris itself, a siege which the Emperor Charles the Fat had raised, not by arms but by the ignominious payment of tribute. It is easy to trace a connexion between these vehement attacks on Frankish territory and the resistance which, in our own country, from Athelney onwards, had been so valiantly offered by Alfred. But now the process was reversed, and the Northmen, severely handled by a Frankish king, were thrown back upon England. In the year 887 Charles the Fat, who had disgusted his subjects by his ignominious treaty with the Danes, was deposed from his imperial dignity, and Arnulf, his nephew, was chosen king by the Franks east of the Rhine, by whose aid he won for himself, nine years after, the grander title of emperor. In 891 he won a great victory over the Danes near the modern city of Louvain. Hereupon the Scandinavians, recognising that “Francia” was for the present closed against them by the might of this new German king, decided to try their fortune once more on the other side of the channel.