If, as is probable, the government had reckoned on being able to take back the greater part of the troops sent to the island, after it had been occupied, this hope was not fulfilled; only one of the four legions sent thither was, as we have seen, recalled under Domitian; the three others must have been indispensable, for no attempt was ever made to shift them. To these fall to be added the auxiliaries, who were called out apparently in larger proportion than the burgess-troops for the far from inviting service in the remote island of the North Sea. In the battle at the Graupian Mount in 84 there fought, besides the four legions, 8000 infantry and 3000 horsemen of the auxiliary soldiers. For the time of Trajan and Hadrian, when of these there were stationed in Britain six _alae_ and twenty-one cohorts, together about 15,000 men, we shall have to estimate the whole British army at about 30,000 men. Britain was from the outset a field of command of the first rank, inferior to the two Rhenish commands and to the Syrian perhaps in rank, but not in importance, towards the end of the second century probably the most highly esteemed of all the governorships. It was owing only to the great distance that the British legions appear in the second rank amidst the rival armies of the earlier imperial period; in the soldiers' war after the extinction of the Antonine house they fought in the first rank. But it was one of the consequences of the victory of Severus that the governorship was divided. Thenceforth the two legions of Isca and Deva were placed under the legate of the upper province, the legion of Eburacum and the troops at the walls--consequently the main body of the auxiliaries--under the legate of the lower province.[114] Probably the transference of the whole garrison to the north, which, as was above remarked, would doubtless have been appropriate on mere military grounds, was not carried out--partly because it would have put three legions into the hands of one governor. [Sidenote: Taxation and levy.] That financially the province cost more than it brought in (p. 172), can accordingly excite no surprise. For the military strength of the empire, on the other hand, Britain was of considerable account; the balance of proportion between taxation and levy must have had its application also to the island, and the British troops were reckoned alongside of the Illyrian as the flower of the army. At the very beginning seven cohorts were raised from the natives there, and these were constantly increased onward to the time of Hadrian; after the latter had brought in the system of recruiting the troops as far as possible from their garrison-districts, Britain appears to have furnished the supply, at least in great part, for its strong garrison. There was an earnest and brave spirit in the people; they bore willingly the taxes and the levy, but not the arrogance and brutality of the officials. [Sidenote: Communal organisation.]