This is it. It all comes down to this moment.

Ever since Alfred the Great had come surging out of the swamps he had been hiding in to defeat the Vikings at Edington, he and his children and grandchildren had been inexorably pushing the Vikings out of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Aethelred was soon to conquer Northumbria which had been held by the Danes for a hundred years, and England was born.

But no sooner had the new nation come screaming into the world than a massive Norse-Irish-Scottish alliance came screaming into Aethelred's new kingdom. It threatened to undo everything that had been achieved.

At Brunanburh in 937 AD the future of England would be decided.

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The King of Wessex had been hunted as a fugitive by marauding Vikings, and he'd been hiding as one in a swamp. Wessex had been overrun and King Alfred had fled, setting up camp amidst the reeds of the Somerset Levels.

But despite his survival, it seemed the same could not be said of Wessex.

But in one of history's greatest comeback stories, he rebuilt his forces whilst in hiding, conducted a guerrilla campaign from the marshes, and then came surging out to rendezvous with the armies of his still-loyal Earldormen.

It resulted in one of England's greatest ever battles, and led confirmed that Wessex, England's last Anglo-Saxon kingdom, would not fall to the Vikings after all.

In doing so, Alfred the Great laid the foundations for the future reconquest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the dawn of England.

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When the Viking warlord, Guthrum, ambushed King Alfred the Great of Wessex while he was celebrating Christmas at Chippenham, Alfred had no choice but to run with his family and a few guards.

Hearing that Guthrum's forces were spreading out all over Wessex, the only safe place for Alfred to go was the marshland of Somerset which he knew as a boy.

Alfred was now a fugitive in his own kingdom, hiding out in a swamp with his family and just a few guards. Mercia had fallen four years earlier, crushed by the Vikings just as Northumbia and East Anglia had been before it.

It seemed Wessex was going the same way.

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