The battle of Brunanburh set the seal on the great task that Alfred had begun and that Eadward I. and Aethelstan had so well continued. So long as the House of Ecgberht continued to bring forth strong rulers, the English Empire held together. The Danelaw was sometimes troublesome; the Northumbrians were always turbulent vassals; but Eadmund I. and his successor, Eadred, coped successfully with all disturbances, and with the fifteen years’ peaceful reign of Eadgar the ideal of English unity appeared to have been nearly accomplished. Yet it was not to be. A long minority, factious magnates, and a worthless king, were to accomplish between them what the mighty sea-kings of the ninth century had failed to achieve. The result of Brunanburh was to establish the ‘Empire of the English,’ and to awe foreign enemies for forty years and no more. Yet few battles of that age were so decisive, and it made a tremendous impression in Europe. Henry the Fowler of Germany requested the hand of the English king’s sister for his son Otto, soon to add fresh lustre to the name of Roman Emperor of the West; and Aethelstan eventually became the brother-in-law of nearly all the monarchs of Western Europe. He also seems to have been in alliance with the famous Harald Harfaagr of Norway, who was working hard at the Sisyphean task of reducing his wild realm to some kind of peace and order. And yet it must regretfully be owned that we know hardly anything of one of the greatest and most successful of English kings-- ‘Aethelstan King, Lord among Earls, Bracelet-bestower and Baron of Barons. _Tennyson’s adaptation of ‘The Song of Brunanburh.’_ CHAPTER VIII LATER VIKING RAIDS AND THE DANISH CONQUEST Men who had seen the famous triumphal procession on the Dee in 973, when Eadgar the Peaceful, rowed by eight vassal princes, passed in his boat by the venerable walls of the ‘Chester’ of Valeria Victrix, must have groaned in spirit at the wretchedness that overwhelmed England in the reign of his worthless son, Aethelred ‘the Redeless.’[D] [D] Aethelred is popularly known as ‘the Unready,’ but the Anglo-Saxon word _rede_ means ‘counsel’ or ‘advice,’ and a better rendering of the king’s nickname is ‘ill-counselled’ or ‘wrong-headed.’