240 THE ISLE OF RUIM. 



highway for the Danish pirates on their way to London, 

 and exposed Thanet exceptionally to their relentless 

 incursions. 



In fact, the Danes and Northmen were just what they 

 loved to call themselves, vik-ings or wickings, men of the 

 viks, wicks, bays, or estuaries. What they loved was 

 a fiord, a strait, a peninsula, an island. Everywhere 

 round the coast of Britain they seized and fortified the 

 projecting headlands. But in the neighbourhood of the 

 Thames, the high road to the great commercial port of 

 London, the mementoes of their presence are particularly 

 frequent. The whole nomenclature of the lower Thames 

 navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is 

 Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), 

 Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill 

 reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, 

 the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, 

 Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the- 

 Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the 

 time when a Danish ' wall 'that is to say, a vallum or 

 earthwork ran across the isthmus to defend the 

 Scandinavian peninsula from its English enemies. 



At such a time Sandwich, with its shallow fiord, was 

 sure to afford good shelter to the northern long ships ; 

 and isolated Thanet, overlooking the navigable strait, 

 was a predestined depofc for the northern pirates, as four 

 centuries earlier it had been for the followers of those 

 mythical personifications, Hengest and Horsa. Long 

 before the unification of England under a single West 

 Saxon overlordship the Danes used to land in the island 

 every year, to plunder the crops, and in 851, when 



