We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied or degraded, the communication with the rest of the island was cut off; we know that when civilisation came back with St. Augustine it had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south and east eastward throughout the succeeding centuries.
Of more than that we are ignorant.
The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries after the first: those second raids which are collectively known in this country under the title of “Danish.”
At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck England again. A few boats’ crews would land, especially in the north, and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be beaten off.
But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids increased in pressure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the south-west in some considerable conflict, killing two of his leaders and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west. In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with thirty-three ships—and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men. But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and the next year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent.
It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to a great simultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English coasts which struck Picardy and Rochester in Kent as well as London. Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some more adventurous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic and off the Norwegian inlets, or there was passing over that unknown pagan society of the north one of those spirits which pass over human societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias. They even dared for the first time to winter without going home, and to pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and were turned out.
