Mercia was saved by a march of King AEthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he made there with the northmen left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to death with arrows.

His martyrdom by the heathen made Eadmund the St.Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St.Edmundsbury rose over his relics.

With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown.

Already the northmen had turned to the richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen.
Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their monks fled or lay slain among the ruins.

Mercia, though still free from actual attack, cowered panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment of tribute owned them as its overlords.
[Illustration: England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3t.jpg)] [Sidenote: Wessex and the Northmen] In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and England north of the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex.