The operations of the five years that followed (892–896[147]) are described by the Chronicle in great detail and with unusual vividness and vigour. A recent editor[148] calls the six or seven pages devoted to these campaigns “the most remarkable piece of writing in the whole series of chronicles”. It is allowable to conjecture that such a narrative, if not from Alfred’s own pen, comes from some person in the immediate neighbourhood of the king. Fresh and vivid, however, as the narrative is, it is not easy to discover therefrom the precise sequence of events. Different bands of Danes are seen to be operating in different parts of the kingdom, and the difficulty which they probably felt in combining their efforts meets also the historian who seeks to combine their narratives. Here it will be sufficient to indicate some of the principal stages of the contest. The invasion of 892 seems to have been made by two bodies of Danes, acting to some extent independently of each other. “The great army” which had been defeated by Arnulf at Louvain, went westwards from Flanders to Boulogne, embarked from the latter port “with horses and all” in a fleet of 250 ships, and sailed across to the Kentish coast. According to their usual custom they made use of a river channel to penetrate into the interior; but the river up which they fared and which probably entered the sea at Lymne, has long since disappeared in that region of silted-up streams. Up the river they towed their ships for four miles, and there they found a “work” half finished and defended by a few rustics. Their capture of this work well illustrates a remark of Asser’s that “of the many forts which Alfred ordered to be built, some were never begun and others, begun too late, were not finished when the enemy broke in upon them by land and sea,” causing tardy repentance and shame on the part of the disobedient builders. The Danish army then constructed for themselves a “work” at Appledore, some twenty miles west of Hythe. The nature of these “works,” of which we hear so much at this point of the history, is explained to us by the Frankish chronicler who describes the Emperor Arnulf’s victory in 891, and who tells us that the Northmen “had according to their usual manner fortified themselves with wood and heaped-up earth”.[149] The description points to a mound crowned with a palisading, such as the Romans had used to protect their encampments.