o much land remained still unreclaimed. But whatever
the power on either side amounted to we may be quite sure that it had
been exerted to the utmost to bring as large a force as possible into
line at Ethandune.

Guthrum fought to protect Chippenham, his base of operations, some
sixteen miles in his rear, and all the accumulated plunder of the busy
months which had passed since Twelfth Night; and it is clear that his
men behaved with the most desperate gallantry. The fight began at
noon--one chronicler says at sunrise, but the distance makes this
impossible unless Alfred marched in the night--and lasted through the
greater part of the day. Warned by many previous disasters the Saxons
never broke their close order, and so, though greatly outnumbered,
hurled back again and again the onslaughts of the Northmen. At last
Alfred and his Saxons prevailed, and smote his pagan foes with a very
great slaughter, and pursued them up to their fortified camp on Bratton
hill or Edge, into which the great body of the fugitives threw
themselves. All who were left outside were slain, and the great spoil
was all recovered. The camp may still be seen, called Bratton Castle,
with its double ditches and deep trenches, and barrow in the midst sixty
yards long, and its two entrances guarded by mounds. It contains more
than twenty acres, and commands the whole country side. There can be
little doubt that this camp, and not Chippenham, which is sixteen miles
away, was the last refuge of Guthrum and the great northern army on
Saxon soil.

So, in three days from the breaking up of his little camp at Athelney,
Alfred was once more King of all England south of the Thames; for this
army of pagans, shut up within their earthworks on Bratton Edge, are
little better than a broken and disorderly rabble, with no supplies and
no chance of succor from any quarter. Nevertheless he will make sure of
them, and above all will guard jealously against any such mishap as that
of 876, when they stole out of Wareham, murdered the horsemen he had
left to watch them, and got away to Exeter. So Bratton camp is strictly
besieged by Alfred with his whole power.

Guthrum, the destroyer, and now the King of East Anglia, the strongest
and ablest of all the Northmen who had ever landed in England, is now at
last fairly in Alfred's power. At Reading, Wareham, Exeter, he had
always held a fortified camp, on a river easily navigable by the Danish
war-ships, where he might lo