of the shire as best he might.  But he had no provisions for a long campaign:  and when the levy had fought once, it melted away immediately, every man going back again of necessity to his own home.  If it won the battle, it went home to drink over its success:  if it lost, it dissolved, demoralized, and left the burghers to fight for their own walls, or to buy off the heathen with their own money.  But every shire and every kingdom fought for itself alone.  If the Dorset men could only drive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, they cared little whether it sailed away to harry Sussex and Hants.  If the Northumbrians could only drive it away from the Humber, they cared little whether it set sail for the Thames and the Solent.  The North Folk of East Anglia were equally happy to send it off toward the South Folk.  While there was so little cohesion between the parts of the same kingdoms, there was no cohesion at all between the different kingdoms over which AEthelwulf exercised a nominal over-lordship.  The West Saxon kings fought for Dorset and for Kent, but there is no trace of their ever fighting for East Anglia or for Northumbria.  They left their northern vassals to take care of themselves.  “It was never a war between the Danes and the national army,” says Prof.  Pearson, “but between the Danes and a local militia.”  It would have been impossible, indeed, to resist the wickings effectually without a strong central system, which could move large armies rapidly from point to point:  and such a system was quite undreamt of in the half-consolidated England of the ninth century.  Only war with a foreign invader could bring it about even in a faint degree:  and that was exactly what the Danish invasion did for Wessex.

The year 851 marks an important epoch in the English resistance.  The annual horde of wickings had now become as regular in its recurrence as summer itself; and even the inert West Saxon kings began to feel that permanent measures must be taken against them.  They had built ships, and tried to tackle the invaders in the only way in which so partially civilised a race could tackle such tactics as those of the Danes—­upon the sea.  A host of wickings came round to Sandwich in Kent.  The under-king AEthelstan fell upon them with his new navy, and took nine of their ships, putting the rest to flight with great slaughter.  But in the same year another great host of 250 sail, by far the largest fleet of which we have yet heard, came to the mouth of the Thames, and there landed, a step which marks a fresh departure in the wicking tactics.  They took Canterbury by assault, and then marched on to London.  There they stormed the busy merchant town, and put to flight Beorhtwulf, the under-king of the Mercians, with his local levy.  Thence they proceeded southward into Surrey, doubtless on their way to Winchester.  King AEthelwulf met them at Ockley, with the West-Saxon levy, “and there made the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that we have yet heard, and gained the day.”  In spite of these two great successes, however, both of which show an increasing statesmanship on the part of the West Saxons, this year was memorable in another way, for “the heathen men for the first time sat over winter in Thanet.”  The loose predatory excursions were beginning to take the complexion of regular conquest and permanent settlement.