At last, however, in 874, the heathens finally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself.

"The host fared from Lindsey to Repton, and there sat for the winter, and drove King Burhred over sea, two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom; and they subdued all the land.

And Burhred went to Rome, and there settled; and his body lies in St.Mary's Church, in the school of the English kin.
And in the same year they gave the kingdom of Mercia in ward to Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostages that it should be ready for them on whatso day they willed; and that he would be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, for the behoof of the host." Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains.
This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarily tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highly important and interesting facts.

It is impossible not to be struck with the extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invaders overran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states.

We cannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmness of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by AElfred in Wessex.
The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of native Northumbrian and Mercian accounts.