2.] A body of them, however, ventured, for the first time, to take up winter quarters in England; and receiving in the spring a strong reenforcement of their countrymen, in three hundred and fifty vessels, they advanced from the Isle of Thanet, where they had stationed themselves, burnt the cities of London and Canterbury, and having put to flight Brichtric, who now governed Mercia under the title of king, they marched into the heart of Surrey, and laid every place waste around them.

Ethelwolf, impelled by the urgency of the danger, marched against them at the head of the West Saxons; and, carrying with him his second son, Ethelbald, gave them battle at Okely, and gained a bloody victory over them.

This advantage procured but a short respite to the English.

The Danes still maintained their settlement in the Isle of Thanet; and, being attacked by Ealher and Huda, governors of Kent and Surrey, though defeated in the beginning of the action, they finally repulsed the assailants, and killed both the governors, removed thence to the Isle of Shepey, where they took up their winter quarters, that they might farther extend their devastation and ravages.
This unsettled state of England hindered not Ethelwolf from making a pilgrimage to Rome, whither he carried his fourth and favorite son, Alfred, then only six years of age.[*] He passed there a twelvemonth in exercises of devotion; and failed not in that most essential part of devotion, liberality to the church of Rome.

Besides giving presents to the more distinguished ecclesiastics, he made a perpetual grant of three hundred mancuses[**] a year to that see; one third to support the lamps of St.Peter's, another those of St.Paul's, a third to the pope himself.[***] In his return home, he married Judith, daughter of the emperor Charles the Bald; but, on his landing in England, he met with an opposition which he little looked for.
His eldest son, Athelstan, being dead, Ethelbald, his second, who had assumed the government, formed, in concert with many of the nobles, the project of excluding his father from a throne which his weakness and superstition seem to have rendered him so ill qualified to fill.