 | Alfred |  |
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ARGUMENT.
After the Danes had made themselves masters of Chippenham, the strongest city in the kingdom of Wessex, Alfred was at once abandoned by all his subjects; in this universal defection, that monarch found himself obliged to retire into the little isle of Athelney in Somersetshire—there, in the habit of a peasant, he liv'd unknown in a shepherd's cottage—he is supposed to be found in this retreat by the Earl of Devon, whose castle upon the river Tau was then besieged by the Danes.
| Alfred | |