The fourteen years of comparative peace which he now enjoyed were devoted to perfecting the military organization of his enlarged kingdom. His fleet was reconstructed: in 882 he went out with it in person and destroyed a small piratical squadron: in 885 we hear of it coasting all along Danish East Anglia. But his navy was not yet strong enough to hold off all raids: it was not till the very end of his reign that he perfected it by building "long ships that were nigh twice as large as those of the heathen; some had 60 oars, some more; and they were both steadier and swifter and lighter than the others, and were shaped neither after the Frisian nor after the Danish fashion, but as it seemed to himself that they would be most handy." This great war fleet he left as a legacy to his son, but he himself in his later campaigns had only its first beginnings at his disposal. His military reforms were no less important. Warned by the failures of the English against Danish entrenched camps, he introduced the long-neglected art of fortification, and built many "burhs"--stockaded fortresses on mounds by the waterside--wherein dwelt permanent garrisons of military settlers. It would seem that the system by which he maintained them was that he assigned to each a region of which the inhabitants were responsible for its manning and its sustentation. The landowners had either to build a house within it for their own inhabiting, or to provide that a competent substitute dwelt there to represent them. These "burh-ware," or garrison-men, are repeatedly mentioned in Alfred's later years. The old national levy of the "fyrd" was made somewhat more serviceable by an ordinance which divided it into two halves, one of which must take the field when the other was dismissed. But it would seem that the king paid even more attention to another military reform--the increase of the number of the professional fighting class, the thegnhood as it was now called. All the wealthier men, both in the countryside and in the towns, were required to take up the duties as well as the privileges of membership of the military household of the king. They became "of thegn-right worthy" by receiving, really or nominally, a place in the royal hall, with the obligation to take the field whenever their master raised his banner. The document which defines their duties and privileges sets forth that "every ceorl who throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm, and a mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold, was to be reckoned gesithcund." A second draft allowed the man who had the military equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into the list, and also "the merchant who has fared thrice over the high seas at his own expense." How far the details of the scheme are Alfred's own, how far they were developed by his son Edward the Elder, it is unfortunately impossible to say. But there is small doubt that the