it, soon became masters of the district near its southern side, and by A.D. 368 the invaders had even reached the metropolis. At this time was sent to Britain a great general, Theodosius, who, with a large army, drove back the Picts and Scots to the north of the Clyde; he also restored and rebuilt many of the towns and fortresses, and to him is attributed the naming of the province of Valentia, which is comprised between Solway Firth and the Tyne, and the Clyde and the Firth of Forth. All this, however, did not prevent the Picts, Scots, and Saxon pirates from re-entering the country as soon as the Roman legions were withdrawn, their services being required elsewhere. Rome, in fact, at this time was fast declining in power, and by the year 410 she had been obliged to call all her troops away from Britain, and Honorius had proclaimed Britain to be an independent state--in other words, the Romans left the country either because they could not any longer retain it, or they did not consider it worth the great drain upon their resources which it must have been. The so-called independence which followed was so disastrous that the Britons found the last state worse than the first, and entreated their former rulers to assist them in repelling the foes they themselves were unable to overcome. They wrote: "The barbarians chase us into the sea, the sea flings us back on the barbarians; the only choice left us is to die by the sword or by the waves." The appeal was in vain, and the wretched Britons were left to their own resources. That they were disorganized and without leaders will easily be understood, and to this must be added that for years the best of the youths had been trained as recruits and drafted off to the Continent, from whence very few returned; and then, again, the inhabitants, especially in the North (including Lancashire), must have been dreadfully reduced by the ravages continually made by the Picts and Scots. Thus it was that Lancashire, with the rest of the country, became an easy prey, first to the marauding foes from the North, and afterwards to those races which ultimately became the makers of England. It is curious to notice the Roman influence on traditions still common in modern Lancashire--the beating of parish bounds recalls the Roman _Terminalia_ in honour of the god of limits and boundaries; May Day is the festival of Flora; the marriage-ring, the veil, the wedding gifts, and even the cake, are all Roman. Our funeral customs are also Roman--the cypress and the yew, the sprinkling of dust on the coffin, the flowers on the grave, and the black clothes.[13] [Illustration] [Footnote 9: "Annals," xii. 31.] [Footnote 10: Tacitus, "Hist.," book iii., ch. lix.] [Footnote 11: Tacitus, "Vita Agricolæ," cap. xx.] [Footnote 12: Xiphiline's abridgment of Dion Cassius. It may be well here to state my general indebtedness to the late W. Thompson Watkin's "Roman Lancashire"; Liverpool, 1883.]