It was at this latter period that the Roman buildings began to be systematically destroyed. It appears that still in the twelfth century, England was covered with the remains of Roman ruined towns and villas standing above ground, as they are still seen, though on a larger scale, in the countries which formed the Roman province in Northern Africa. We have seen the superstitious feelings which prevented people approaching these ruins in our island, and it required nothing less than the hand of the Church to interfere and break the charm which kept the rest of society aloof. We learn from the history of the abbots of St Alban’s, written in the thirteenth century by Matthew Paris, that already in the eleventh century the abbots of that great religious house had begun to break the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium, in order to use them as building materials. This practice became very general in the twelfth century, and from that time the Roman ruins were pillaged on an extensive scale whenever a monastery or a church was to be built. The ancient city at Wroxeter was probably one of the great quarries from which the builders of Haughmond Abbey were supplied, and no doubt it contributed materials to other monastic houses in this part of the country. The church of Atcham, the adjoining parish, and that of Wroxeter itself, bear evidence to this appropriation of building materials taken from ancient Uriconium. At the time when this inroad was made upon the ruins, the ground, as explained before, was already raised several feet above the Roman floors; and the mediæval builders, finding plenty of material above ground, cleared away the walls down to the surface of the ground as it then existed, and sought them no further. This accounts for the condition in which we now find these walls, that is, remaining tolerably perfect just up to the height of what was the level of the ground, at the time the rest was destroyed. The difference between the tops of the walls as they now exist under ground, and the present surface of the ground, is the accumulation of earth which has taken place since this destruction. It was the destruction of the buildings which first caused this accumulation, by scattering about the fragments of the plaster of the walls and the broken tiles and stones which were not worth carrying away. After the walls above ground disappeared, and the ground was levelled and cleared, such accumulation went on much more slowly.