Britain shared with the other provinces in the disasters which fell upon the empire in the third century, in the days of the weak usurpers who held the imperial throne after the extinction of the family of Severus. Three races are recorded as having troubled the land: the first was the ancient enemy, the Caledonians from beyond the wall, whom now the Chronicles generally style _Picts_, "the painted men," because they alone of the inhabitants of Britain still retained the barbarous habit of tattooing themselves. The second foe was the race of the Saxons, the German tribes who dwelt by the mouths of the Elbe and Weser. They were great marauders by sea, and so vexed the east of Britain by their descents that the emperors created an officer called "The Count of the Saxon Shore,"[2] whose duty was to guard the coast from the Wash as far as Beachy Head by a chain of castles on the water's edge, and a flotilla of war-galleys. The third enemy was the Scottish race, a tribe who then occupied northern Ireland, and had not yet moved across to the land which now bears their name. They infested the shores of the province which lay between the Clyde and the Severn. [Sidenote: =Carausius.=] Attacked at once by Pict and Scot and Saxon, the province declined in prosperity, and gained little help from the continent where emperors were being made and remade at the rate of about one every three years. Britain seems to have first recovered herself in the time of Carausius, a "Count of the Saxon Shore," who proclaimed himself emperor, and reigned as an independent sovereign on our side of the Channel (287). His fleet drove off the Saxons, and his armies held back the Pict and Scot as long as he lived. But after a reign of seven years the rebel emperor was murdered, and three years later the province was reunited to the empire. [Sidenote: =Constantius and Constantine.=]