It was fortunate for Britain that it came under the rule of Rome, not in the time of the Republic, when the conquered peoples were ruined by spoliation and enslavement; nor yet in the earlier years of the empire, a time of conflict and unsettlement, but after the death of the infamous Caligula, when Claudius had assumed the purple. At the beginning of the second century the Roman Empire was, under Trajan, at its culminating point of magnitude and power. Trajan was succeeded by Hadrian, whose governmental solicitude was shown in continuous journeying over his vast empire; and by the general construction of border fortification, of which the wall in Britain, linking the Tyne with the Solway Firth, is an example. Antoninus followed Hadrian, and of him it has been said: “With such diligence did he rule the subject peoples that he cared for every man of them, equally as for his own nation; all the provinces flourished under him.” His reign was tranquil, and his fine personal qualities obtained for him the title of Pius. Of course for Britain it was the rough rule of military conquest; but it prevented tribal conflicts, secured order, and encouraged material development; corn was exported, the potter’s wheel was at work, there was tin-mining in Cornwall, and lead-mining in Northumberland and Somerset; iron was smelted in the Forest of Dean.

But distance from the seat of government, as well as its murky skies, and wintry severity—no vines, no olive or orange trees in its fields—made Britain an undesirable land for Roman colonisation; it was held chiefly as a military outpost of the empire.

Whilst the more intimate Roman rule in South Britain gave there its civilizing institutions, its Latin tongue, its arts, laws, and literature, and in the fourth century Christianity, these results became less emphasized northwards—hardly reaching to the wall of Hadrian. The country between the walls remained in the possession of heathen semi-barbarians, scarcely more civilized or trained in the arts of civil government than were the Celtic tribes of the north. There were no Roman towns, and very few remains of Roman villas have been found, beyond York: remains of roads and camps, of altars and sepulchral monuments are found. To the south of York, Britain was a Roman settlement; north of York it was a military occupation.

In spite of its roads, its towns, and its mines, Britain was still, at the close of the Roman rule, a wild, half-reclaimed country; forest and wasteland, marsh and fen occupied the larger portion of its surface. The wolf was still a terror to the shepherd; beavers built their dams in the marshy streams of Holderness.

Unarmed, and without any military training, feeling themselves weak and helpless in the presence of the dominant race, the Britons of the province were yet sufficiently patriotic, to give negative help at least to the Pictish tribes who were ever making incursions into the district between the walls, and even at times penetrating into the heart of the province. One of these inroads in the reign of Valentinian all but tore Britain from the empire: an able general, Theodosius, found southern Britain itself in the hands of the invaders; but he succeeded in driving them back to their mountains, winning back for Rome the land as far as the wall of Agricola, and the district between the walls was constituted a fifth British province, named after the Emperor, Valentia.

And whilst the Pictish clans were thus making wild dashes over the walls, the sea-board of the province was harrassed by marauders from the sea. Irish pirates called Scots, or “wanderers,” harried the western shores; whilst on the eastern and southern coast, from the Wash to the Isle of Wight, a stretch of coast which came to be called the Saxon Shore, Saxon war-keels were making sudden raids for plunder, and for kidnapping men, women, and children, to be sold into slavery. They also intercepted Roman galleys in the Channel, which were engaged in commerce, or on imperial business. In the year 364, a combined fleet of Saxon vessels for a time held the Channel.

And now the Romanized British towns began to shew their lack of faith in imperial protection, by strengthening themselves by walls. A special Roman commander was appointed, charged with the defence of the Saxon shore. The shore was dotted by strong forts, garrisoned by a legion of ten thousand men. The thick forests which lined the coast to the westward of Southampton water were considered sufficient guards against invasion in that quarter. As long as the Romans remained in Britain they were able to repel the attacks of their barbarous assailants. But when the fated hour came—when Rome in her death-struggle with the Teutonic hordes, whose gripe was at her throat in every one of her dominions in western Europe, and even in Italy itself, had to recall her troops from Britain—then the encircling foes closed in upon their prey.

In withdrawing, in 410, his troops from Britain, the Emperor Honorius, grandson of the general Theodosius we have mentioned, told the people in a letter to provide for their own government and defence. We may imagine how ill prepared, after ten generations of servitude, the Romanized Britons were for such an emergency. But they had fortified towns with their municipal institutions, and under the general sway of Rome they had lost their tribal distinctions, and become a more united people; and not in any one of the Romanized lands which became a prey to the barbarians did these encounter so prolonged and so energetic a resistance as in Britain. For some thirty years after the Roman evacuation of the province, it held out or maintained a fluctuating struggle with its enemies. The Scoto-Irish bucaneers were not only continuing their raids upon the western coast, but they planted settlements in Argyle to the north of Agricola’s wall, and in Galloway—between the two walls. And the Picts were ever making incursions from the north. The policy was tried of hiring barbarian against barbarian. The Picts were the nearest and most persistent danger; and the marauders from over the North Sea,—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, were, if not hired as mercenaries, permitted to hold a footing in the land, as a defence against Pictish invasion. About 450, three keels filled with Jutes, under two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, with a white horse as their cognisance, came by invitation from their own home—which is from them called Jutland—and landed on the Isle of Thanet on the eastern Kentish shore, making this their base for further conquests.