186 



wliich, if the reader is not already familiar with it, he may learn 

 the history, in a very interesting little work by Dr. Bruce : 

 " The Wallet-book of the Eoman Wall." 



At every four miles along this fortification there was a station 

 for 600 infantry or 500 to 1000 cavalry; besides a castle, the 

 size of those at the gates of Gloucester, at every mile, and 

 sentry stations at every quarter of a mile. The Eoman period 

 is so distant that we hardly realize it. Here were from ten to 

 fifteen thoiosand men, kept on guard day and night for three 

 hundred years, on this wall only; besides a legion at York, 

 another at Chester, another at Caerleon, and cohorts of foot, 

 or wings of cavalry, at nearly all the large towns in Britain. 



If England had kept up an army of fifty thousand men, say 

 in the far north of India, from the days of Queen Elizabeth 

 to the time of Victoria, we should have even in this a picture 

 far short of the reality of what the Romans did in Britain when 

 the population of Europe was but feeble in proportion to its 

 present number. 



I have shewn a certain agreement in the masonry of the 

 stations severing Wales from England. The reason for this, it 

 appears to me, was a similar one to that which decided Hadrian 

 to plant his wall and garrison across from the Tyne to the 

 Solway : i.e., to prevent a coalition of the British tribes on the 

 two sides of the boundary ; or an invasion from one side of it, 

 to the part well settled under Roman rule. 



But in Wales they had two chief points to guard : the Severn 

 and the Dee ; as the greatest massing of the natives had taken 

 place near the mouths of these rivers. 



Of these two divisions, that of the Silures, or South Welsh, 

 was by far the more formidable ; as their repeated onslaughts 

 on the Roman boundary had within a few years of its arrival 

 compelled the second legion to move its base into their very midst. 



While the second legion was stationed to hold the Severn, the 

 twentieth placed its camp on the Dee ; where, under Agricola, 

 it succeeded in so far destroying the tribe there (the Ordovices) 

 that we find it able to spare large detachments of men for 

 service farther north. 



