A glance at the map given at the end of this book will show about four miles from the Humber, on the road from Barton to Caistor, a village named Burnham. At this village there are still to be seen the remains of an ancient entrenchment enclosing a space of about 64 acres. One of the half-dozen ancient spellings of the name of the manor of Burnham is _Brunan_, and the suffix _burh_ means ‘a fortified place.’ Further, men’s bones, Saxon coins, and a Saxon sword have been ploughed up on the adjoining fields; while just south of Burnham there was in the eighteenth century a road known as ‘Bloody Gate’ and just north of it there is still a ‘Dead Man Dale.’ So we shall have to concede that the southern bank of the ‘yellow flood’ has some considerable claims to the possession of the site of the famous battle of Brunanburh. * * * * * Let us pass on to the middle of the next century. For twenty-eight years England had been ruled by Danish Kings, when, in 1042, the Saxons came into their own again and the third Saxon Edward began to rule in London. But Danish jarls still ruled at JORVIK[19] and Jarl Siward, the eighth of these, was the greatest of them all. In 1054 he took a large army and a fleet into Scotland, where he fought against the Scots in Aberdeenshire, and slew their king Macbeth. Siward’s son Osbern was also slain in the battle, and when news of his son’s death was brought to the old jarl, he rejoiced that his son had died a worthy death. In Shakespeare’s play _Macbeth_ it is put thus. Ross, a Scots nobleman, has just broken to Siward the news that his son ‘has paid a soldier’s debt’:— _Siward._ Had he his hurts before? _Ross._ Ay, on the front. _Siward._ Why then, God’s soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death. Footnote 19: Pronounced _Yór-wik_. One year later Siward’s own death took place, and these were his words when he felt that he was fated to die not on the battlefield but in his bed:— ‘I feel shame not to have fallen in one of the many battles that I have fought, and to have been preserved to die like a cow. Close me in my mail of proof, gird my sword on me, fit the helmet on my head, and put a shield in my left hand and a gilded axe in my right, that I may die like a soldier.’ So died the lord of the manors of Barmston and Holmpton, and the greatest of the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria. After his death his earldom was given by King Edward to Tostig, the son of Earl Godwin the West Saxon; and if one-half of the stories told about him by the old chroniclers are true, the Northumbrians must have felt the change acutely.