The year 1069 saw the only serious and determined attempt to overthrow the Norman rule. A great Danish fleet, sent by Sweyn Estrithson, arrived in the Humber, joined the Northumbrians, and marched on York. It was stormed and captured, and 30,000 foreign soldiers, it is said, were slain or taken. But that was all, and the peril died down before William’s vehement energy. The Danish fleet was bought off--William was as ready as Philip of Macedonia to use ‘silver spears.’ Then the King reoccupied York, and, lest any succeeding Scandinavian invasion should find a foothold, wrought the awful devastation of the north--the worst deed that stains his otherwise not ignoble character. The north, wasted and ruined, was at his feet, and the reappearance next year of Sweyn with a great fleet ended in a mere fiasco. The Danes and the East Anglian rebels did little but plunder abbeys, and after sundry useless demonstrations the Danes returned home. There now remained in all England in arms against William only the gathering in the Isle of Ely under the famous outlaw Hereward. Thither came sundry English leaders, powerless and discredited, who now could only swell the band of an erstwhile obscure chief. Eadwine had already disappeared--slain, so says the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,’ by his own men. Morkere succeeded in reaching Ely; but at best the leaders were but a poor remnant. The position of Ely, surrounded by its waters, was strong; but the garrison was not sufficiently numerous to take the offensive with any hope of success. William fixed his headquarters at Cambridge; a fleet was collected and brought up the Wash, and the lines of investment were steadily drawn round the doomed stronghold. A causeway was driven across the fens, and when at last it reached firm land, after many checks and surprises inflicted by the watchful Hereward, Ely was forced to surrender. Legends have clustered thickly about the figure of Hereward ‘the Wake.’ He was certainly taken into William’s favour, and was commanding troops for him on the Continent some years later. The mass of the rank and file, however, were treated with what seems to us horrible barbarity, being maimed and mutilated wholesale. The punishment of death the ‘stark’ and terrible Conqueror was always very chary of inflicting. Famous as the defence of Ely has become, it is noteworthy that the Chronicle does not seem to regard it as other than an isolated incident in the struggle. It is at any rate clear that it could never have done more than temporarily check the progress of the Conqueror, just as eighteen centuries before the defence of Eira could only delay the Spartan conquest of Messenia.