It seems highly probable that besides providing accommodation in their camps for very large numbers of people, the Danes sometimes fortified the hithes where they drew up their ships on shore, or even constructed fortified harbours.[142] We have already quoted Mr Spurrell's remark on the hithe[143] at Benfleet (p. 51), and there is at least one place in England which seems to prove the existence of fortified harbours. This is Willington, on the river Ouse, in Bedfordshire, which has been carefully described by Mr A. R. Goddard.[144] This "camp" consists of two wards, and a wide outer enclosure (Fig. 7). "But one of the most interesting features is the presence of two harbours, contained within the defences and communicating with the river." Mr Goddard points out that the dimensions of the smaller one are almost the same as those of the "nausts" (ship-sheds or small docks) of the Vikings in Iceland. He also cites from the _Jomsvikinga Saga_ the description of a harbour made by the Viking Palnatoki at Jomsborg. "There he had a large and strong sea _burg_ made. He also had a harbour made within the _burg_ in which 300 long ships could lie at the same time, all being locked within the burg." The harbours at Willington are large enough to accommodate between twenty-five and thirty-five ships of the Danish type. Unfortunately there is no historical proof that the Willington works were Danish, though their construction makes it very likely. Nor have any works of a similar character been as yet observed in England, as far as we are aware. But if archæology and topography give a somewhat scanty answer to our question about the nature of Danish fortifications, there are other fields of research, opened up of late years, from which we can glean important facts, bearing directly on the subject which we are treating. Herr Steenstrup's exhaustive inquiry into the Danish settlement in England has shown that the way in which the Danes maintained their hold on the northern and eastern shires was by planting fortified towns on which the soldiers and peasants dwelling around were dependent.[145] The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ gives us a glimpse of these arrangements when it speaks of the Danes who owed obedience to Bedford, Derby, Leicester, Northampton, and Cambridge.[146] It also tells us of the Five Boroughs, which, as we have already said, appear to have been a confederation of boroughs forming an independent Danish state between the Danish kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria.