That, very likely, was why they became poor warriors. In A.D. 43 came the second and most effectual Roman invasion. That extraordinary person the Emperor Claudius, persuaded by a British exile named Berre, who had got the worst of one of the petty quarrels in which the Britons then, like the Welsh later, were constantly engaged, dispatched Aulus Plautius with four legions and some Gallic auxiliaries to reconquer Britain. So much is certain, and there is no doubt that a year sufficed to quell the resistance of south-eastern Britain, although Caradoc, Cunobelin's son, held out in the west for a long time. In the next year Claudius himself crossed the Channel--one authority says he brought elephants in his train--and joined Plautius on the north of the Thames. Shortly afterwards he entered Camulodunum, or Colchester. Did he enter it as having himself conquered, or as an Emperor taking the credit of his general's victories? It is really almost impossible to say. Merivale, having previously mentioned the elephants, says, "At Gessoriacum he embarked for the opposite shores of Cantium (Kent), and speedily reached the legions in their encampment beyond the Thames. The soldiers, long held in leash in expectation of his arrival, were eager to spring upon the foe. With the Emperor himself at their head, a spectacle not beheld since the days of the valiant Julius, they traversed the level plains of the Trinobantes, which afforded no defensible position, till the natives were compelled to stand at bay before the stockades which encircled their capital, Camulodunum. It is not perhaps too bold a conjecture that the lines which can still be traced from the Colne to a little wooded stream called the Roman river, drawn across the approach to a tract of twenty or thirty square miles, surrounded on every other side by water, indicate the ramparts of this British _oppidum_. Within this enclosed space there was ample room, not only for the palace of the chief and the cabins of her people, but for the grazing ground of their flocks and herds in seasons of foreign attack; while, resting on the sea in its rear, it commanded the means of reinforcement and, if necessary, of flight. But the fate of the capital was decided by the issue of the encounter which took place before it. The Trinobantes were routed. They surrendered their city and, with it, their national freedom and independence. The victory was complete; the subjection of the enemy assured. Within sixteen days from his landing in Britain, Claudius had broken a powerful kingdom and accomplished a substantial conquest."