10 ROMAN WORKS IN YORKSHIRE. 



strongly marked modern representatives. Their coasts 

 were invaded fifty-five years before the Christian era by 

 Roman cohorts which soon pushed as far north as Yorkshire 

 and planted at ^Eboricum, now York city, their most north- 

 erly and also their most important centre. Here, at this 

 great military post, three Roman Emperors in successive 

 centuries established their courts and dazzled with the 

 splendors of their display the ruder fancy of their subject 

 realm. Adrian, the first general of Imperial dignity to 

 push so far north, had head-quarters for a while at York, 

 A. D. 121. Here died in February, 211, the gouty old 

 Emperor and General, Septimius Severus, while being 

 carried about on a litter in an effort to conquer the Scots ; 

 and a century later, in July, 306, another Roman Emperor, 

 Constantius, visiting the city on the same troublesome er- 

 rand, attended by his more distinguished son who suc- 

 ceeded him as Constantino the Great, died at York also, 

 and the obsequies and apotheosis of both were celebrated 

 here with a magnificence quite beyond the power of lan- 

 guage. Here, then, their famous military roads converged 

 and from this point in all directions their wonderful towers 

 and castles, still defying time and mocking at modern sci- 

 ence, dominated hillside and glebe, far and wide, while the 

 splendid intrenched camps which dotted the plains brought 

 life and activity and civic arts to an insular and unpolished 

 people. The two elements, British and Roman, lived to- 

 gether on such varying terms as they might until the Anglo- 

 Saxon invasion, which may be placed, for our purposes, at 

 the middle of the fifth century and which was followed by 

 that of the Scandinavian Norsemen in the middle of the 

 ninth century, and by that of William, the Norman Con- 

 queror, about the middle of the eleventh century. 



It is fair enough to say that since the invasion of the 

 Anglo-Saxons, who profoundly impressed themselves upon 



