London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- History -- 16th century -- Sources; London (England) -- Surveys
Whereupon ambassadors were eftsoon dispatched to Rome, lamentably
beseeching that they would not suffer their miserable country to be
utterly destroyed: then again another legion was sent, which coming upon
a sudden, made a great slaughter of the enemy, and chased him home, even
to his own country. These Romans at their departure, told the Britons
plainly, that it was not for their ease or leisure to take upon them any
more such long and laborious journeys for their defence, and therefore
bade them practice the use of armour and weapons, and learn to withstand
their enemies, whom nothing else did make so strong as their faint heart
and cowardice; and for so much as they thought that it would be no small
help and encouragement unto their tributary friends whom they were now
forced to forsake,[12] they built for them a wall of hard stone from the
west sea to the east sea, right between those two cities, which were
there made to keep out the enemy, in the selfsame place where Severus
before had cast his trench. The Britons also putting to their helping
hands as labourers.
This wall they built eight feet thick in breadth, and twelve feet in
height, right, as it were by a line, from east to west, as the ruins
thereof remaining in many places until this day do make to appear. Which
work, thus perfected, they give the people strait charge to look well to
themselves, they teach them to handle their weapons, and they instruct
them in warlike feats. And lest by the sea-side southwards, where their
ships lay at harbour, the enemy should come on land, they made up
sundry bulwarks, each somewhat distant from the other, and so bid them
farewell, as minding no more to return. This happened in the days of the
Emperor Theodosius the younger, almost 500 years after the first arrival
of the Romans here, about the year after Christ’s incarnation 434.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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