THE 



361 



THE 



first battle, in which however Alexander was defeated. The 

 campaign ended in the tyrant being obliged to resign his 

 conquests, withdraw his troops from Phthiotis and Mag- 

 nesia, and enter into alliance with Thebes. Still Alexander 

 did not cease to be an object of hatred and dread to his sub- 

 jects and foreigners, by his cruelties and piracies, and at 

 last his wife Thebc conspired with her three half-brothers 

 to murder him. (B.C. 339.) They effected their purpose, and 

 one of them, Tisiphonus, under the direction and with the 

 :ion of Thebe, assumed the government. But his 

 reign lasted a very short time : for towards the end of B.C. 

 \ve find Lycophron, another of the brothers, at the 

 head of affaire. The new dynasty however seems to have 

 been as unpopular with the'fhessalians as the old one, and 

 accordingly, with the Aleuadae at their head, they applied 

 to Philip, king of Macedon, and requested his assistance. 

 Lycophron applied to his allies, the Phocians, the antient 

 enemies of the Thessalians, at that time under the com- 

 mand of Onomarchus. Philip invaded Thessaly, and, after 

 gaining some success, wa.s obliged to retire ; but he shortly 

 aids returned at the head of a large army, and made 

 himself master of the whole country, Lycophron withdraw- 

 ing into Phocis. Philip wished to be considered as a 

 liberator; and accordingly he restored popular govern- 

 ment at Pherte (Diodorus, xvi. 38), though he kept posses- 

 sion of its port Pagasse, and garrisoned Magnesia with his 

 own troops. The important services which he thus ren- 

 dered to the Thessalians secured their attachment to his 

 intere-ts, and, in addition to this, afforded him the opppr- 

 luiiit . :ic a strong footing in the country, of which 



he diil not fail to avail himself. It would appear however 

 'Thirl'.vall, ///*/. of Greece, vol. vi., p. 12; that about B.C. 

 :)H, either the tyiants of Pherae or their party there had 

 :,icd their ascendency, and Philip i was again invited 

 fu dislodge them. This he effected with ease, and then 

 :nself of the opportunity to make Thessaly en- 

 lirely subservient to his interests, and in fact to render it 

 virtually a province of Macedonia. After expelling the 

 dynasty of the tyrants, he garrisoned the citadel of Pherae 

 v.ith his own troops, to prevent, as he gave it out, any 

 chance of their restoration to power. He also strengthened 

 his own authority by effecting what was professedly a 

 (i to the antient order of things in Thessaly. This 

 vival of the tctradarchies as political divisions 

 of the- country, for though this antient division into four 

 districts still sub>Uted, it had long been rather a geogra- 

 phical than a political arrangement. At the head of the 

 four governments he placed his devoted adherents, the 

 chiefs of the Aleuad party, so that they were in reality his 

 viceroys or deputies. The result is described by Demos- 

 thene- 'ili/nlli.. i. 23j as amounting to a total subjection 

 of the land to Philip, whom it supplied with excellent and 

 numerous troops ; besides which, he not only received the 

 .our duties and customs of the country, but also appro- 

 priated to himself the tribute which had always been paid 

 to Larissa by her subject Perrhsebian cantons. (Strabo, 

 ix., p. 440.) On his death the states of Thessaly passed a 

 decree confirming to his son Alexander the supreme sta- 

 tion which Philip had held in their councils, and also 

 Minified their intention of supporting his claim to the 

 title of commander-in-chief of the whole Grecian con- 

 federacy. Immediately after the death of Alexander (B.C 

 .'J'23 , a confederacy was formed against the Macedonians 

 l.y the Athenians and other states of Greece, which the 

 in were induced to join. Antipater, the viceroy 

 !;u-edonia, was unable to raise an army sufficiently 

 liirge to cope with the confederacy, and after a battle, in 

 which some Thessalians deserted him and caused his de- 

 feat, he retired to Lamia, a town of Tlie.ssaly, where he 

 lioicgcd for some time by Leosthenes, the Athenian 

 general. The siege was however raised by Leonnatus, an 

 eminent Macedonian general, and some additional rein- 

 forcement under Craterus enabled him to bring to a suc- 

 t'ul issue what was called the Lamian war, in which 

 the ; s took a very prominent part, and which 



nearly proved fatal to the Macedonian influence not only 

 in Thesealy, but over the whole continent of Greece. 

 Thessaly was thus preserved to the Macedonian crown till 

 the reign of Philip, son of Demetrius, from whom it was 

 taken by the Romans after the battle of Cynoscephalae 

 Hi? . All The.i.-iily was then declared free (Liv., 

 xxxiii. 32; by a decree of the Roman senate and people, 

 but from that time it may be considered as under the 

 P. C., No. 1533. 



dominion of Rome, though its possession was disputed by 

 Antiochus (Liv., xxxvi. 9), and again by Perseus, son of 

 J hilip, between whom and the Romans it was the arena 

 of more than one conflict. It w-as already a Roman pro- 

 vince when the fate of the empire of the universe was 

 decided by the battle between Pompey and Caesar on the 

 >lains of Pharsalus. 



The slave-merchants of Greece were generally Thessa- 

 ians. (Aristophanes, Plutus, 517.) Their chief slave- 

 narket was Pagasse, the port of Pherae. 



(Clarke, Dodwell, and Gell's Travels ; Leake's Travels 

 'n Northern Greece ; Thirlwall, History of Greece ; Cra- 

 mer, Antient Greece, vol. iii., p. 343 ; Wachsmuth, Helle- 

 tische Alterthumskunde, vol. i., p. 65.) 



THETFORD, a small parliamentary borough, partly in 

 he hundred of Grimshoe, in the county of Norfolk, partly 

 n Lackford hundred, in the county of Suffolk, 88 miles 

 rom London by the Norwich mail-road through Wood- 

 brd, Epping, Bishop Stortford, Newmarket, and Bury St. 

 Edmunds ; and 30 miles from Norwich by Attleburgh. It 

 las been confidently asserted that Thetford existed in the 

 ime of the Romans, or even antecedent to their arrival ; 

 :>ut it cannot be identified with any of their towns that 

 lave been mentioned in antient recoids. Plot and Blome- 

 ield attempted to fix here the Sitomagus of the ' Antonino 

 Itinerary ;' others have proposed to fix here the Iciani of the 

 Itinerary,' but without any solid ground for their opinion. 

 The Ikeneld or Icknield Street or Way, and a road called 

 :he Peddar or leddar Way, crossed the Little Ouse above 

 Thetford, but not very near it. Blomefield describes some 

 traces of fortifications as existing in his time, but it is not 

 clear that they were Roman. Some coins of the earlier 

 emperors, from Claudius to Antoninus Pius, have been 

 found. Under the East Angles it was a place of im- 

 portance : a synod was held here A.D. GG9. When the 

 Danes invaded England in the reign of Ethelred I., they 

 fixed their head-quarters, A.D. 870, at Thetford (called in 

 the Saxon Chronicle, Theodford, Theotford, and Theot- 

 forda ; and by other old writers Tedford and Thedford), 

 which they sacked : and it is likely that the battle in 

 which they defeated Edmund, king of the East Angles, was 

 fought not far off. There appears to have been an abbey 

 near the town at an early period, for king Edred, the grand 

 son of Alfred the Great (A.D. 952), 'ordered a great 

 slaughter to be made in the town of Theotforda, in revenge 

 of the abbot, whom they had formerly slain.' (Saxon 

 Chronicle; Florence of Worcester.) In the reign of 

 Ethelred II. the town was burnt by the Danes (A.D. 1004) 

 under Sweyne, but on their return to their ships they were 

 intercepted by the Anglo-Saxons under Ulfkytel, and did 

 not make good their retreat without serious loss. They 

 burned the town again A.D. 1010. In A.D. 1075 the bish- 

 opric of the East Angles was transferred from North Elm- 

 ham to Thelford, but remained there not twenty years, 

 being transferred (A.D. 1094) to Norwich. At this time 

 Thetford was a town of considerable size and importance ; 

 it was a burgh with 944 burgesses in the time of Edward 

 the Confessor ; but at the time of the Domesday Survey 

 there were only 720 burgesses, 224 houses being unin- 

 habited. It gave name to the hundred in which it stood. 

 After the removal of the bishopric to Norwich, or perhaps 

 before, a Cluniac priory was founded here, the revenues of 

 which at the dissolution were 418/. C*. 3d. gross, or 

 312/. 14*. 4|rf. clear. There was also a house of canons, 

 which was afterwards a nunnery, a Dominican friary, and 

 several smaller religious houses or hospitals. Thetford was 

 the seat of one of the suffragan bishoprics established by 

 Henry VIII. There have been as many as twenty churches ; 

 thirteen are mentioned in Domesday. 



The borough of Thetford, according to the Population 

 Returns for 1831, comprehends three parishes, with an 

 area of 8270 acres, and a population of 34G2. The parishes 

 of St. Cuthbert and St. Mary are very much inter- 

 mingled, and are partly in Suffolk and partly in Norfolk : 

 the whole of the other parish (St. Peter) is in Norfolk. 

 The town is chiefly on the north-east or Norfolk bank 

 of the Little Ouse ; a smaller part is on the opposite 

 or Suffolk bank. The town is irregularly built, and is 

 neither paved, watched, nor lighted, but has a neat 

 and clean appearance. It has no manufactures, but there 

 is a good deal of malting, and the trade of the place 

 is favoured by the river being navigable up to the town, 

 by means of which an export of agricultural produce and 



VOL. XXIV. 3 A 



