England had no further trouble with Norse or Danish invaders until the days of Ethelred the Unready, but no sooner did that weak and ill-advised king come to the throne than, with that ready and intimate knowledge of local conditions which they always displayed, we find Danes making an attack on Southampton and Norsemen one on Chester. The renewed attacks were not however due solely to the weakness of England, they were also the result of changed conditions in Scandinavia itself. In Denmark the reign of Harold Bluetooth was drawing to a close, and the younger generation, conscious of a strong and well-organised nation behind them, were ambitious of new and larger conquests, while at the same time many of them were in revolt against the definitely Christian policy of Harold in his old age. They turned with hope towards his young son Svein, and found in him a ready and willing leader. In Norway, Earl Hákon had broken away from the suzerainty of Harold Bluetooth, but the Norwegians could not forget that he owed his throne to a foreign power, and his personal harshness and licentiousness as well as his zealous cult of the old heathen rites were a cause of much discontent. The hopes of the younger generation were fixed on Olaf Tryggvason, a man filled with the spirit of the old Vikings. Captured by pirates from Esthonia when still a child, he was discovered, ransomed, and taken to Novgorod, where he entered the service of the Grand Duke Vladimir. Furnished by him with a ship he went 'viking' in the Baltic and then ten years later we find him prominent among the Norsemen who attacked England in the days of king Ethelred. In 991 a Norse fleet under Olaf visited Ipswich and Maldon. Here they met with a stout resistance headed by the brave Byrhtnoth, earl of Essex, and in the fragmentary lay of the fight at Maldon[7], which has been preserved to us, we see that there was still much of the spirit of the heroic age left in the English nation even in the days of Ethelred II. It was to buy off this attack that a payment of Danegeld to the extent of some ten thousand pounds was made. From Maldon Olaf went to Wales and Anglesey and it was somewhere in the west that he received knowledge of the Christian faith from an anchorite and was baptised. He did not however renounce his Viking-life, but joined forces with his great Danish contemporary Svein Forkbeard. Bamborough was sacked in 993, and both were present at the siege of London in 994, when they sailed up the Thames with 490 ships. The attack was a failure and Olaf came to terms with Ethelred agreeing to desist from further attack in return for a payment of sixteen thousand pounds of Danegeld. Olaf was the more ready to make this promise as he was now addressing himself to the task of gaining the sovereignty of Norway itself. Many of the Norsemen returned with Olaf but the attacks on the coast continued and the invaders, chiefly Danes now, ravaged the country in all directions.