CHAPTER I.HOW THE FIRST DANES CAME TO ENGLAND.
Two fair daughters had Offa, the mighty King of Mercia, and Quendritha his queen.

The elder of those two, Eadburga, was wedded to our Wessex king, Bertric, in the year when my story begins, and all men in our land south of the Thames thought that the wedding was a matter of full rejoicing.

There had been but one enemy for Wessex to fear, besides, of course, the wild Cornish, who were of no account, and that enemy was Mercia.

Now the two kingdoms were knit together by the marriage, and there would be lasting peace.
Wherefore we all rejoiced, and the fires flamed from the hilltops, and in the towns men feasted and drank to the alliance, and dreamed of days of unbroken ease to come, wherein the weapons, save always for the ways of the border Welsh, should rust on the wall, and the trodden grass of the old camps of the downs on our north should grow green in loneliness.

And that was a good dream, for our land had been torn with war for overlong--Saxon against Angle, Kentishman against Sussexman, Northumbrian against Mercian, and so on in a terrible round of hate and jealousy and pride, till we tired thereof, and the rest was needed most sorely.
And in that same year the shadow of a new trouble fell on England, and none heeded it, though we know it over well now--the shadow of the coming of the Danes.