ETHELWULF, or Aethelwulf, an Anglo-Saxon king, succeeded his father Egbert about 836. His reign, like that of his father, was almost wholly occupied with wars against the Danish invaders. For a long time he held them in check, and when in 851 they took Canterbury and London, and defeated Beohrtwulf, king of the Mercians, he met them at Ockley in Surrey, and there “made the greatest slaughter among the heathen army that we have heard tell of unto the present day, and there got the victory.” But the Northmen were persevering in their efforts; and it is stated that in 855 they, for the first time, remained over winter in Sheppey. In the same year Ethelwulf made a journey to Rome, accompanied by his youngest and favourite son Alfred, to get the latter consecrated as his successor; and as his first wife Osburga had been for some time dead, he elayed a few months in France to marry Judith, daughter of t θ king of the Franks, Ethelbald, his eldest surviving son, indignant at his youngest brother being preferred to him as successor to his father’s throne, took advantage of his father’s absence to stir up a revolution against him, and obtained the support of so powerful a party that an unnatural civil war was only prevented by Ethelwulf agreeing to grant to his son the government of Wessex, he himself being recognized as over-lord, and retaining the rest of the kingdom. He died in 858.