1 6 Roman Britain and Early England 



tions, and there were great stretches where grass, natural unculti- 

 vated clover, and other vegetation grew luxuriantly and made 

 some of the best pasture in the world. This was not only 

 because the Romans had opened up the country with roads and 

 put much grass land under the plough, but because Britain was 

 then, as it is now, an extremely attractive and sound country in 

 which to carry on the business of farming. In the year A.D. 84 

 Agricola led a large army with at least 3,000 cavalry to the north 

 of the Tay. It was British agriculture which supported this 

 force as well as the larger one which opposed it, and Roman and 

 British cavalry, and the war chariots then in use, strongly built 

 as they were, had passable country in which to travel and 

 manoeuvre. If the restless, migrating tribes of the world had 

 been able to visit every country at that time, and to choose one 

 in which to settle, some of the wisest would have chosen Britain. 



More important than the country were the people who had 

 now taken possession. The Anglo-Saxons came by tribes and 

 families, and apart from their losses in the war of conquest and 

 from dispersion on their journey they settled in Britain as they 

 had lived in Germany. They had never enjoyed the advantages 

 or suffered the disadvantages of being ruled by the Romans. 

 They were not accustomed to cities, and if they did not destroy 

 those they found in Britain, they avoided them. They chose 

 places in which to plant their tuns or townships. They marked 

 off a tract of land sufficiently large to supply all the needs of 

 the group of families who were to live together. Somewhere 

 near the centre of this tract they fenced in a portion with a 

 hedge, and here they built their houses. Each house stood apart 

 from the rest in a little plot of land, and this was the only land 

 which belonged privately to a member of the township. 



The ploughed or arable land lay in open fields, and it was cut 

 up into strips of one acre, separated from each other by a narrow 

 line of turf. Each member had a certain number of strips 



