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plundered and burnt; while the bones which lie scattered among them tell their tale 
of the flight and massacre of its inhabitants, of women and children hewn down in 
the streets, and wretched fugitives stifled in the hypocausts, whither they had fled 
with their little hoards of money for shelter. A British poet, in verses still left 
to us, Llywarch Hen, in his Eleyy on Kyndylan, sings piteously the death- 
song of Uriconium, ‘‘The white town in the valley,” the town of white stones 
gleaming among the green woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it, when he 
sang, a heap of blackened ruins, where the singer wandered through halls he had 
known in happier days, the halls of its chief Kyndylan, ‘‘ without fire, without 
light, without song,” their stillness broken only by the eagle’s scream, the eagle 
‘‘ who has swallowed fresh drink, heart’s blood of Kyndylan the fair.” 
There is every reason to believe that the Roman stations and towns in 
Herefordshire were destroyed and burnt in a similar manner ; and though history 
is silent upon it, the inference is very strong that the Anglian chief Creda, ‘‘Crida,” 
or ‘*Creoda,” as his name is differently spelt, who is believed to have occupied 
Credenhill Camp for some years, to have widened its ditches, and strengthened 
its entrenchments, was the destroyer of them all. Creda was the first King of 
Mercia, or the district of the Marches, and the destruction of the Roman stations 
and towns would be a necessity for him, in order to secure his own position. 
Creda is supposed to have ruled from a.p. 583 to 600, which seems to point out 
the date of the destruction of Magna, Ariconium, Cicutio, Blackwardine, 
Bravinium, and all the other small Roman Stations that may have existed in this 
county, as having occurred at the end of the sixth century. 
The solid structure of Roman masonry could not be destroyed by fire. 
The woodworks and roofs might be burnt, and the contents of the buildings 
reduced to ashes, but the blackened walls would remain, and the most remarkable 
circumstance is that they should continue to remain not only unoccupied, but 
almost untonched for centuries. They were left desolate, to become overgrown 
with brambles and bushes, and to be the haunt of the wild beasts, which at that 
time abounded in the woods. Mr, Thomas Wright attributes this singular neglect 
to the strong superstition of the people. ‘‘ The Teutonic invaders,” he says, “ had 
a prejudice against towns. They believed the deserted buildings were taken 
possession of by powerful evil spirits, on whose limit it was highly dangerous to 
trespass” (p. 18). He supports this theory by several arguments. When Augus- 
tine and his missionaries came over in 597 to convert, once again, the Anglo- 
Saxons to Christianity, the Kentish King received them in the open air, lest the 
strangers from Rome should cast a spell upon them within walls. Again, in all 
the Benedictionals of the Anglo-Saxon period are special forms for blessing the 
vessels of metal or earthenware found in the ruins of the towns, to relieve them 
from “pagan spells.” Again, when the little bronze figures we prize so much 
were found, the people mutilated them to save themselves from personal danger, 
and threw them into the nearest river; and they regarded inscriptions on stones 
as magical charms and defaced them also. There are also various legends of the 
period which bear out the supposition. 
