They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while they raided Ireland. It was in the year 851 that there came at last a great fleet of these purposeless destroyers to the Thames mouth, three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have brought for the first time in numbers really threatening, was beaten as it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were met at Ockley[5] by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut to pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester which leads through Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to winter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865, they had been wintering in England, this time in Thanet. The Kentish men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down England north of Thames. In ’71 they are in Reading, but not, it would seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ashdown, but they were in no way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year they still marched up and down England. The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of conquest, organisation, or government, ruining as they went, and you have in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as: “Here the host travelled over the mouth of Humber to York.” “Here the host went to Mercia and to Nottingham.” “Here the host went again to York.” “Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters in Thetford.” “Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their winter quarters at Torksey.” “Here the host went to Repton”--and so forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter--a perpetual raid until in 878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above Eddington. Thenceforward the pressure is against the pirates.