ning short in Exeter, but the Exe was open and
communications going on with Wareham. It is arranged that the camp there
shall be broken up, and the whole garrison with their spoil shall join
head-quarters. One hundred and twenty Danish war-galleys are freighted,
and beat down channel, but are baffled by adverse winds for nearly a
month. They and all their supplies may be looked for any day in the Exe
when the wind changes. Alfred, from his camp before Exeter, sends to his
little fleet to put to sea. He cannot himself be with them as in their
first action, for he knows well that Guthrum will seize the first moment
of his absence to sally from Exeter, break the Saxon lines, and scatter
his army in roving bands over Devonshire, on their way back to the
eastern kingdom. The Saxon fleet puts out, manned itself, as some say,
partly with sea-robbers, hired to fight their own people. However
manned, it attacks bravely a portion of the pirates. But a mightier
power than the fleet fought for Alfred at this crisis. First a dense fog
and then a great storm came on, bursting on the south coast with such
fury that the pagans lost no less than one hundred of their chief ships
off Swanage, as mighty a deliverance perhaps for England--though the
memory of it is nearly forgotten--as that which began in the same seas
seven hundred years later, when Drake and the sea-kings of the sixteenth
century were hanging on the rear of the Spanish _armada_ along the Devon
and Dorset coasts, while the beacons blazed up all over England and the
whole nation flew to arms.

The destruction of the fleet decided the fate of the siege of Exeter.
Once more negotiations are opened by the pagans; once more Alfred,
fearful of driving them to extremities, listens, treats, and finally
accepts oaths and more hostages, acknowledging probably in sorrow to
himself that he can for the moment do no better. And on this occasion
Guthrum, being caught far from home, and without supplies or ships,
"keeps the peace well," moving as we conjecture, watched jealously by
Alfred, on the shortest line across Devon and Somerset to some ford in
the Avon, and so across into Mercia, where he arrives during harvest,
and billets his army on Ceolwulf, camping them for the winter about the
city of Gloster. Here they run up huts for themselves, and make some
pretense of permanent settlement on the Severn, dividing large tracts of
land among those who cared to take them.

The campaigns of