viving brother, Æthelred, in 866, the northern storm broke with far other force upon Britain. ¹ Its occupation had now, indeed, become almost a necessity for the Wikings. It was the one measure which could draw their other conquests together. They already occupied the Faroes and the Shetlands, the Orkney Isles and the Hebrides. On either side of Britain they were a settled power. The west coast of Ireland was dotted with their towns, while eastward their settlements formed a broken line from Friesland to Bordeaux. But, in the very heart of their field of operations, Britain still lay unconquered, for their descents on its shores had only ended as yet in hard fighting and defeat. And yet it was the winning of Britain which was needed above all to support and widen their conquests to the. eastward and westward of it. Had the pirates once become masters of this central post the face of the west must have changed. Backed' by a Scandinavian Britain, their isolated colonies along the Irish coast must have widened into a dominion over all Ireland, while their settlement along the Frankish coast might have grown into a territory stretching over much of Gaul. In a word, Christendom would have seen the rise of a power upon its border which might have changed the fortunes of the western world. Such political considerations, indeed, can hardly have affected any save the

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