invaders would retire; but Plautius hunted them out, and subdued the country south of the Thames. The emperor himself soon after appeared in Britain, crossed the Thames, and routed an army of the natives; and having been in the island but sixteen days in all, returned and triumphed at Rome. The war in Britain was continued by Plautius and his lieutenant Vespasian, the future emperor. The command was afterwards (51) given to P. Ostorius, who carried his arms to the Avon and the Severn; he easily routed the Icenians; the resistance of the Silurians, under their gallant chief Caractacus (Caradoc), was more stubborn, but the legions were victorious in a great battle, in which the family of the chief became captives, and he himself seeking refuge with Cartismandua, queen of the Brigantians, was by her basely surrendered. They were led before the tribunal of Claudius, in the presence of assembled Rome. The British prince addressed the emperor in dignified and manly terms, and life and liberty were granted to him and his family.

The defeat and capture of Caractacus did not end the war ; the Silurians still gave the Romans abundant employment, and Ostorius died worn out with care and anxiety. His successors Didius and Veranius carried on the conflict without much success. At length (62) the command in Britain was given to Suetonius Paulinus, an officer of great ability and courage. Regarding the isle of Mona (Anglesea), which was the chief seat of the Druids, as the centre of union and focus of resistance among the Britons, he resolved to reduce it. He led his army to the strait or the Menai; they beheld the opposite shore covered by armed Britons, among whom, with wild gestures, dishevelled locks, and brandishing flaming torches, ran women exciting them to courage, while the Druids stood apart, and with hands upraised to heaven devoted the invaders of their sacred isle. The Romans paused: at length, urged by the voice of their general, they advanced their

standards: the foe made but a brief resistance; the isle became the dominion of the victors, who built there a fort, and cut down the groves which so often had witnessed the human sacrifices offered by the Druids.

While Suetonius was thus engaged, he was summoned to quell an insurrection in the part called the Province. The king of the Icenians, when dying, had followed the Roman practice of making Cæsar heir, along with his two only daughters, hoping thus to secure their succession ; but the Roman officers entered on his kingdom as a conquered country; they violated the princesses, beat and scourged their mother Boadicea, and plundered and enslaved the nobles. Joined by the Trinobantians, the Icenians flew to arms; the veterans who had been placed as a colony at Camalodunum (Maldon) having behaved with the usual violence and insolence of the Roman military colonists, were the first objects of attack, They were utterly destroyed; the legate Cerealis, who was leading his troops to their aid, was defeated. Suetonius, on coming by forced marches to Londinium (London), found it necessary to leave that flourishing city and the municipal town of Verulamium (St. Albans) to their fate, and seventy thousand persons were slaughtered in them by the Britons. The Roman general having drawn together a force of about ten thousand men, took up a position flanked by eminences, his rear being secured by a wood. The plain in front was soon filled with the troops and squadrons of the advancing

Boadicea, bearing her insulted daughters in her car, drove from nation to nation, exhorting them to avenge their injuries. The fight began; but victory soon took the side of skill and discipline; eighty thousand Britons, it was said, lay slain. Boadicea terminated her life by poison. Fire, sword, and famine then wasted various parts of the island.

The successors of Suetonius were inactive; Vespasian, when emperor, gave the command in Britain to Cerealis, who made war with success against the Brigantians, and

foes;

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then to Frontinus, who subdued the Silurians. Vespasian next committed Britain to Cnæus Julius Agricola, a man who united in his person all the civil and military virtues. Soon after his arrival (80) he retook Mona, of which the Britons had repossessed themselves; he then devoted himself to conciliating the minds of the natives by a proper regulation of the tributes, and by introducing justice into the administration of affairs. After some time (82) he led out his troops and conquered the country to the æstuary of the Taus (Tweed?), and the next year (83) he built a line of forts from the firth of Forth to that of Clyde. He had some thoughts of invading Ireland, one of whose princes being expelled had sought his aid, and he was of opinion that a single legion and a few auxiliaries would suffice for the conquest of that island, whose people were even more barbarous than the Britons. The tribes north of the firths, who were called Caledonians, meantime (85) prepared for war; they assailed the Roman forts; they also fell on the ninth legion in the night, and were near overcoming it. Agricola resolved to invade their country; he advanced as far as the Grampians, which he found occupied by an army of thirty thousand warriors, which was receiving daily accessions of strength; each clan was led by its own chief, but the superior abilities of Galgacus were acknowledged by all, and the chief command was given to him. The infantry, armed with claymore and target, occupied the hills; the horse and war-cars moved about on the plain. But vain as ever were the arms and courage of the mountaineers against the discipline of the legions; the night beheld ten thousand Caledonian warriors lying dead on the plain. Agricola having advanced somewhat further into the country, and forced some of the tribes to give him hostages, led his army back to winter-quarters. His fleet meantime sailed northwards, and having succeeded in circumnavigating the island, returned to its usual station at Sandwich.

The conquests of Agricola gave the Roman dominion in Britain its greatest extent. All the native tribes south of the firths lived henceforth in peaceful submission to the Empire; the Roman language and manners were gradually diffused among them; colonies and municipal towns were spread over the island; war was unknown, except on the northern frontier, where the untamed Caledonians gave the legions occasional employment. Against their incursions the emperor Hadrian, when in Britain, built a wall from the Tyne to the Solway firth, and in the reign of his successor Antoninus a similar wall was constructed on the line of the forts between the firths raised by Agricola. The distance of Britain from the seat of government, and the security of its insular position, often excited its prefects to assume the imperial purple, and it was hence named “ an isle fertile of usurpers (tyrannorum).” The two most celebrated of these usurpers were Carausius, at the end of the third, and Maximus at the end of the fourth century.

During the period of Roman dominion the zeal of the early Christians introduced the beneficent religion of the Gospel into Britain, as into all other parts of the empire, and it became the dominant faith throughout the Romanized part of the island. The names of Pelagius, a Welshman, and of Celestius, a North Briton, are famous on account of their theory of original sin and free-will, which caused them to be ranked among the heretics of those times*.

When internal decay, and the pressure of the barbarians from without, were menacing the existence of the empire,

the troops were gradually withdrawn from the more remote provinces. The Picts*, as the people north of the firths were now called, being strengthened by the Scots of Ireland who had settled on the west coast of their country, began to pour in their ferocious hordes on the Roman province; they even reached and plundered London, and though defeated, renewed without ceasing their incursions. The Saxons from the opposite coast of Germany also made frequent plundering descents on the unwarlike province. The legions were at length totally withdrawn, and the Britons left to their own resources.

Instead however of uniting against the common enemies, their princes and chiefs wasted their powers in contests for the supremacy of the island. At length (449) Gwerthern, or Vortigern, a British prince, being hard pressed by his rival for dominion, Aurelius Ambrosius (who claimed descent from Maximus), and harassed by the incessant inroads of the Scots and Picts, resolved on the fatal expedient of taking a body of the Saxon freebooters into his service, and he formed a treaty with two of their chiefs, named Hengist and Horsa.