So there is no limit to the number of places--a gorge, with a wood behind and an open plain in front--capable of being accepted as the field of this particular battle. It may have been anywhere in southern England. Still if, like the Trojans when they were hoodwinked by the Greeks into opening the gates of Troy too soon, men would like to localize the field of battle somewhere, so that they may conjure up the scene anew, there is no reason in life why they should not amuse themselves thus at Messing. They can look at the camp at Haynes Green and conjure up in imagination the fourteenth legion in close ranks in the centre, with the cavalry massed on either flank. They can think they hear the general heartening them for the combat and telling them not to mind the yells of the savages--for that is what a high-sounding Latin paragraph comes to in effect. They can see in fancy Boadicea making the circuit of her warriors in a chariot, her outraged daughters in front of her, inciting her hearers to frenzy. They can gaze in imagination on the Neronian legionaries when, having exhausted their javelins on the attacking mobs ("battalions," which Merivale uses, is far too orderly a word), they charged the Britons _en masse_, and the cavalry joining them at the gallop with out-stretched lances. They can imagine the tangle of wagons, warriors, women and children into which the Roman soldiers plunged, sparing no living thing. _Clara et antiquis victoriis par eâ die laus parta_, says Tacitus. "The glory of that day was quite like the old victories. Men say that rather less than eighty thousand Britons fell as against four hundred soldiers killed and not many more wounded." They can believe that boast of a military historian who was away at Rome, if they like; and there is really no harm in their fancying that all this happened at Messing if they please. To do so will make Messing interesting, and nobody will ever be able to locate the battle anywhere else with any more certainty.