More than twenty years later they raided from Boulogne into Kent, and it was in that same raid in 893 that again the Thames was violated. Haesten, whom we call Hasting, came up so far as Milton, that is the first good landing-place upon the southern shore of the inland Thames just opposite Tilbury.[6] He was working with another force to the south in the Rother, but nothing came of this double attack. There was no sailing up river. The station at Milton was broken up and Hasting went down river, crossed to the northern shore, and established himself at Benfleet. The men of London, with a reinforcement of the national army, took his fort and broke all that part of the Danish force, and his ships were either destroyed or brought up river to London, or some up the Medway to Rochester, but Hasting himself who had been raiding was not captured. He came back with that part of his force which had been with him, summoned sundry parties of the raiding Danes from other parts of England, made a new base not far from the old one, and started upon a new raid right across England to the Western Sea. When he had returned he brought such ships as remained to him up river into the Lea, built yet another fort upon that stream twenty miles from London. Once more that base was destroyed. The river Lea was blocked below their settling place, such ships as they had, destroyed or taken to London again. And meanwhile the astonishing Danish host survived, raiding out again across England in a final effort. But their sea power was gone. They wintered at Bridgenorth in the west. Their few remaining ships, six in number, attempted the Isle of Wight and Devon. Alfred beat them off, also catching three aground, but of the remaining three two were left upon the Sussex coast and their crews hanged in Winchester. The last one left, full of wounded men, made East Anglia. In 901 Alfred died, but though he had prevented the raiding of the Danes from destroying Christian England, the plundering went on year after year, but for many years the Thames was free. Seventeen years later they fell upon Severn mouth and were beaten off, and the story goes on with a gradual reconquest of the posts which the pagans had established in the Midlands. It was not until 980 that they touched again at Thames mouth in Thanet, harrying it, and two years later they seem to have come up river and attacked London once more, but there is a bare mention of it, and nothing further. But with that end of the century you come to a very different set of wars--a political attempt of the northern raiders, now organised in regular fashion, and almost a kingdom by themselves, upon the verge of accepting Christianity and of entering into the European Commonwealth. These new fights were fought not for plunder but for conquest. They ended in success, and the critical moment of the campaign was decided in the Thames.