Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
about burning and wasting England. The wooden towns were flaming
through the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from
Thamesmouth to Cambridge. "And next was there no headman that force
would gather, and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there
no shire that would help another." When the first fury of the
plundering invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to
settle and till the land and have some measure of peace, the early
meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border-
town, in Oxford. Thus Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came
to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were slain at a banquet, while
their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them. "Into the
tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as men could not drive
them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning."
So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the
story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde.
There is another version of the story in the Codex Diplomaticus
(DCCIX.). Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to
St. Frideswyde's Church ("mine own minster"), that the Danes were
slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, "by the
advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the
wheat, the Danes in England.
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