It was probably about the same time that Prasutagus, King of the Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk, Suffolk and a part of Cambridgeshire, became a subject ally of Rome. Farther south the invaders were making less peaceful progress, if it be true, as we are told by the biographer of the future Emperor Vespasian, that he in these early years of the conquest “fought thirty battles as commander of the Second legion, subdued two powerful nations, took more than twenty towns and brought into subjection the Isle of Wight”. We learn from another source that he was once, when surrounded by the barbarians and in imminent peril of his life, rescued by his brave son Titus, and further that it was the elder soldier’s distinguished successes in this British war which won him the favour of the Roman people, and led to his being eventually clad in the imperial purple. An interesting evidence of the rapid development of this first act of the Roman conquest is afforded by the fact that a pig of lead mined in the Mendip Hills has been discovered, bearing the name of Claudius and his son with a date equivalent to A.D. 49, only six years after the landing of the legions. In the year 47, Aulus Plautius left Britain to receive the honour of an ovation, then almost exclusively reserved for the imperial family, and to find his wife Pomponia (a woman of gentle nature but touched with sadness) tending towards “a foreign religion” which, there is good reason to believe, was none other than Christianity. He probably left the frontier of the Roman dominion nearly coincident with a line drawn diagonally from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, though outlying districts like Cornwall and Devonshire were not yet assimilated by the new lords of Britain. But even so the fairest and most fertile half of Brythonic Britain was now apparently won for the empire.