CNUT also, and Edric, laid their plans for obtaining by treachery the success which they could not gain by arms, and Edric undertook to betray King Edmund. In consequence, by his advice, the king went into Wessex* to lead a very powerful army against Cnut, who, meanwhile, had laid siege to London, which he furiously assaulted both by land and water, but the citizens defended it manfully.
The fifth time, King Edmund, again fording the river Thames at Brentford, went into Kent to give battle to the Danes, but at the first encounter of the standard-bearers in the van of the armies, a terrible panic seized the Danes, and they took to flight. Edmund followed them with great slaughter as far as Aylesford,* and if he had continued the pursuit, the Danish war would have been ended that day. But the traitorous counsel of the ealdorman Edric induced him to halt. Never had more fatal counsel been given in England.*
* Wessex was an ancient English kingdom that, since its heyday under King Egbert (r. 802-839), had reached right across England south of the Thames, from Kent to Cornwall. Following Edmund’s death in 1016, King Cnut granted the region to his ally Godwin, whom he created Earl of Wessex.
* Aylesford is a village on the River Medway in Kent, four miles northwest of Maidstone.
* See also If England to Itself Do Rest but True, where in the closing lines of William Shakespeare’s King John, Henry III’s cousin Philip Faulconbridge reflects that a kingdom’s greatest threat always lies in treachery at home.