The introductory observations in the preceding chapter will be sufficient to show that the mode of life, the vessels and utensils, and even the residences of the Anglo-Saxons, were a mixture of those they derived from their own forefathers with those which they borrowed from the Romans, whom they found established in Britain. It is interesting to us to know that we have retained the ordinary forms of pitchers and basins, and, to a certain degree, of drinking vessels, which existed so many centuries ago among our ancestors before they established themselves in this island. The beautiful forms which had been brought from the classic south were not able to supersede national habit. Our modern houses derive more of their form and arrangement from those of our Saxon forefathers than from any other source. We have seen that the original Saxon arrangement of a house was preserved by that people to the last; but it does not follow that they did not sometimes adopt the Roman houses they found standing, although they seem never to have imitated them. I believe Bulwer’s description of the Saxonised Roman house inhabited by Hilda, to be founded in truth. Roman villas, when uncovered at the present day, are sometimes found to have undergone alterations which can only be explained by supposing that they were made when later possessors adapted them to Saxon manners. Such alterations appear to me to be visible in the villa at Hadstock, in Essex, opened by the late lord Braybrooke; in one place the outer wall seems to have been broken through to make a new entrance, and a road of tiles, which was supposed to have been the bottom of a water course, was more probably the paved pathway made by the Saxon possessor. Houses in those times were seldom of long duration; we learn from the domestic anecdotes given in saints’ legends and other writings, that they were very frequently burnt by accidental fires; thus the main part of the house, the timber-work, was destroyed; and as ground was then not valuable, and there was no want of space, it was much easier to build a new house in another spot, and leave the old foundations till they were buried in rubbish and earth, than to clear them away in order to rebuild on the same site. Earth soon accumulated under such circumstances; and this accounts for our finding, even in towns, so much of the remains of the houses of an early period undisturbed at a considerable depth under the present surface of the ground.