5. BENFLEET.--Here Hæsten wrought a work in 894; here he was defeated by Alfred's forces, and some of his ships burnt. Mr Spurrell states that there are still some irregular elevations by the stream and about the church, which he believes to be remains of the Danish camp.[124] "As the fleet of ships lay in the Beamfleet, it is obvious that the camp must have partaken of the character of a fortified _hithe_, with the wall landward and the shore open to the river and the ships." He also learned on the spot that when the railway bridge across the Fleet was being made, the remains of several ancient ships, charred by fire, and surrounded by numerous human skeletons, were found in the mud.[125] Benfleet must have been a very large camp, as not only was the joint army of Danes housed in it, that from Milton and that from Appledore, but they had with them their wives and children and cattle. 6. SHOEBURY (Fig. 6).--After the storming of the camp at Benfleet by the Saxon forces, the joint armies of the Danes built another _geweorc_ at Shoebury in Essex. We should therefore expect a large camp here, and Mr Spurrell has shown that the area was formerly about a third of a square mile. About half the camp had been washed away by the sea when Mr Spurrell surveyed it in 1879, but enough was left to give a good idea of the whole. It was a roughly square rampart, with a ditch about 40 feet wide, the ditch having a kind of berm on the inner side. The bank also had a slight platform inside, about 3 feet above the general level.[126] As Hæsten had lost his ships at Benfleet, there would be no fortified hithe connected with it, and if there had been, the sea would have swept it away. The camp was abandoned almost as soon as it was made, and the Danish army started on that remarkable march across England which the _Saxon Chronicle_ relates. They were overtaken and besieged by Alfred's forces, in a _fastness_ at 7. BUTTINGTON, on the Severn.--It has sometimes been contended that this was the Buttington near Chepstow; but as the line of march of the army was "along the Thames till they reached the Severn, then up along the Severn,"[127] it is more probable that it was Buttington in Montgomery, west of Shrewsbury.[128] Here there are remains of a strong bank with a broad deep ditch, which was evidently part of a rectangular earthwork, as it runs at right angles to Offa's Dyke, which forms one side of it. It now encloses both the churchyard and vicarage. Whether the Danes constructed this earthwork, or found it there, we are not told.