On winds the Severn, gliding with steady flow by meadows, shelving fields or copses, till it comes at last to Atcham, with its bridge and picturesque old church near the waterside. Here was born Ordericus, afterwards historian of William the Conqueror. About a mile below, the little Tern adds its waters to the Severn, near the home of the Berwicks; and yet another mile, and the river glides by the parish church of Wroxeter, with its interesting Norman work, and the site of the Romano-British city of Uriconium, on the famous Watling Street road; founded, as is supposed, about the reign of Trajan, to guard the passages over the Severn and the outlets from Wales. In the year 577 a band of West Saxons forced their way, plundering and destroying as they went, up the rich valley of the Severn. Uriconium was taken, and, as the bard lamented, "The white town in the valley went up in flames, the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodland; the hall of its chieftain left without fire, without light, without song: the silence broken only by the eagle's scream--the eagle who had swallowed fresh drink--heart's blood of Kyndylan the Fair." The walls of Uriconium were three miles in extent, and the area enclosed was larger by nearly a third than that of Pompeii. Excavations have been made which have disclosed a basilica, or public hall, a hypocaust belonging to the baths, and many foundations of houses; but no work of a high class, either in architecture or in decorative art, has been discovered. Uriconium at best was only a provincial city, and that in distant Britain; and even if it had possessed any important buildings, they would have perished, if not from the fury of the barbarian invaders, at least by the hands of those in later days, who used it as a quarry. Most of the things dug up are preserved in the museum at Shrewsbury. "In the corner of the hypocaust three skeletons were found--one of a man, and two of women; by the side of the former lay a heap of copper coins, numbering a hundred and thirty-two, which belonged to the days of the later emperors, and some bits of rotten wood and rusty iron, which may have been the fragments of a box. It is supposed that some poor wretches, perhaps servants at the baths, sought refuge here during the sack of the city, and then perished, either suffocated by the smoke of its burning or buried alive by the fallen ruins."[2] [Illustration: THE SEVERN FROM BENTHALL EDGE (_p. 98_).]