Posting along these roads they had a fine system of mounted messengers, one messenger, at a post say twenty miles out of Rome, taking up, with a fresh horse, the message which another had brought out from the city, and so on--perhaps as far as Byzantium (the name of Constantinople had not yet been thought of) eastward, as far as the coasts of Gaul, from which men could look across to the cliffs of Britain, northward. They were roads along which armies would march, trade would be carried, government officials, with all their train of slaves and servants, would go to their appointed places in the provinces, carrying with them Roman ideas of discipline and obedience, Greek arts and thought and, possibly, and more and more as time went on, the new religion of Christianity. At the northern cliffs of what we now call France the road would come to an end--of necessity, because there the sea began. But, once across the narrow sea which we call the Channel, the road building would begin again, if the Romans were intending to make any long stay in the country. The first time that the Roman legions came they were led by Julius Cæsar about 50 years B.C. Probably that wise general and statesman did not think that the cost of making Britain a part of the Roman Empire was worth paying, at {3} that time. His legions had plenty to do in keeping the tribes of Gaul in order. He established no Roman authority in Britain, but sailed back to the Continent, and the Romans seem to have paid no attention whatever to Britain for nearly a hundred years. [Sidenote: Claudius in Britain] And on this second occasion of their coming there is no doubt that they came intending to stay. It was about A.D. 50, or a little sooner, that Claudius, the emperor, himself with the legions, appeared in Britain and easily made himself master of most of the southern and all the south-eastern part of the island. We must try to get a picture in our minds of the state of Britain at that time, and realise how the people lived and what kind of people they were. Perhaps the first thing to realise about them is that they were not English at all. This name English, if it was used in those days at all, was the name of a tribe that lived across the North Sea on what we now call Sleswig. North of them lived a tribe called the Jutes, on that Jutland from which the great sea-fight takes its name, and south of them a tribe called Saxons. All were of the same race, originally, and all came conquering to Britain--but not just yet.