Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
Egbert led his army against the invaders; and encountering them at Ellandun, in Wiltshire, obtained a complete victory, and, by the great slaughter which he made of them in their flight, gave a mortal blow to the power of the Mercians.
"The king has gone," I said. "You Mercians may best know whither." One of them laughed, and sat down again. "You have a strange idea of a jest in Carl's camp, paladin," he said. "What is it? The king gone, with us sitting here at his door, forsooth!" "No jest, thane, but the truth," I said, taking the tall wax torch which was on the table before them. "Come."
Repton, Lichfield, and Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March.
Poor Buhred, titular King of the Mercians, who has made believe to rule this English kingdom these twenty-two years who in his time has marched with his father-in-law Ethelwulf across North Wales has beleaguered Nottingham with his brothers-in-law, Ethelred and Alfred, six years back, not without show of manhood sees for his part nothing for it under such circumstances but to get away as swiftly as possible, as many so-called kings have done before him, and since.
And as he did so the Mercians, Streone's men, wheeled round and fell on our flank, fighting for the Danes, and the Danish line swept the Stamford men from before them and joined the Mercians; and I heard a great sob rise in Eadmund's throat, and he called to me, and charged among the traitor's men to reach him if he might.
So the pagan army quitted Reading, and wintered in 872 in the neighborhood of London, at which place they received proposals from Buhred, King of the Mercians, Alfred's brother-in-law, and for a money payment pass him and his people contemptuously by for the time, making some kind of treaty of peace with them, and go northward into what has now become their own country.
Ponder it, and ask thyself if thy power, when I am dead, is not necessary to the weal of England? and if aught that thy schemes can suggest would so strengthen that power, as to find in the heart of the kingdom a host of friends like the Mercians; or if there could be a trouble and a bar to thy greatness, a wall in thy path, or a thorn in thy side, like the hate or the jealousy of Algar, the son of Leofric?"
But even while Cædmon was singing the glories of Northumbria and of the Irish Church were passing away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its fall. Only a few years after Penda's defeat the Mercians threw off Oswin's yoke and set Wulfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne. They were aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife which was now rending the Northumbrian realm.
He himself was in the centre with his Wessex men, and Edric Streone and his Mercians were with him. There were some of us who had cried out at that, but the earl had said proudly that he would make amends for former ill, and the council had listened to and believed his words.
"And of Alfred, too, I have ever been reminded by his brother; your name has seldom been long absent from our conversation." Alfred reddened. "I trust now," he continued, "that I may profitably renew an acquaintance suspended for three years. I am but young, only in my eighteenth year, and I have no father; let me find one in the wisest of the Mercians."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking