endless amount of British wattle-work. Yet that is exactly what has happened. In the low ground, now occupying the place of the impenetrable marshes which gave the name of the Isle of Avalon to the higher ground, the eye of a local antiquary had long marked a mass of dome-shaped hillocks, some of them of very considerable diameter, and about seventy in number, clustered together in what is now a large field, a mile and a quarter from Glastonbury. The year before last he began to dig. Peat had formed itself in the long course of time, and its preservative qualities had kept safe for our eyes that which it enclosed and covered. The hillocks proved to be the remains of British houses burned with fire. They were set on ground made solid in the midst of waters, with causeways for approach from the land. The faces of the solid ground and the sides of the causeways are revetted with wattle-work. There is wattle-work all over, strong and very well made. It clearly was the main stand-by of the Britons, whose fortress this was, and their skill in making it and applying it was great. The wattle when first uncovered is as good to all appearance as the day it was made. The huts are oval and circular, and some are of large dimensions. The largest of all are not yet opened, but already a hut covering about 450 square feet has been found. All have a circular area of white stones in the middle, carried from far, for a hearth, &c., and all have been destroyed by fire. But though the fire has destroyed the huts completely, it has preserved for us the account of the material of which they were made, as clearly as if it were inscribed on the brick cylinders of an Assyrian king. It has baked the clay with which the huts were covered, and the baked clay shews the impress of wattle-work. The houses of the Britons at Glastonbury were, as a matter of fact, as long tradition tells us their church was, made of wattles[18].

Julius Caesar speaks more than once of the skill of the British in this respect. He tells us of the plaiting together of the branches of growing trees to form barriers in the woods, which his soldiers found unpleasantly effective. We read also of the wattle-work erections of various shapes in which human victims were enclosed to be burned. And, from a more peaceful side, we learn that the tables of ladies in Rome were not completely in the fashion if they had no examples of British baskets. “Basket,” as you know, is one of the best examples of the survival of a British word among us, a word used also by the Romans[19], their word bascauda and our “basket” representing the Welsh basgawd and basget.

There is abundance of evidence of the interest taken by the Romans in Britain and its people, and of the esteem in which Britons were held at Rome. Martial, who settled in Rome in the year a. d. 66, perhaps one year or two years before St. Paul’s death, speaks of a British lady in Rome, Claudia, the newly-married wife of Pudens. Of her he says[20], in terms as he believed of the highest personal praise—

Though Claudia from the sea-green Britons came,
She wears the aspect of a Roman dame.

And, again, he mentions, not without pride, that he was read in Britain: ‘Britain, too, is said to sing my verse.’ It is a little difficult to resist the tendency to see in this Pudens and Claudia the Pudens and Claudia of the last sentence before the final blessing in the last letter of St. Paul, where their names are linked together by that of Linus, the first Bishop of Rome. We are told, however, that the severe historian ought to resist this tendency of the natural man.

Again, Seneca, the brother of Gallio, whom we meet in the Acts, had a great deal of money invested in Britain. Juvenal brings a British king into his verse, and Richborough oysters. Josephus[21] tells us that Titus made use of the Britons, as a telling illustration in his final speech to the desperate Jews:—“Pray what greater obstacle is there than the wall of the Ocean, with which the Britons are encompassed? And yet they bow before the arms of the Romans.”

Those are probably sufficient indications of the kind of evidence we have. We know, too, that the Roman troops came and went; and we may be sure that they made Britain and the strange things they had seen here a frequent subject of conversation. We cannot doubt that St. Paul, in his enforced intercourse with the soldiery at Rome, learned all he could about the distant parts of the world, which only the Roman armies had visited. Nay, we in London may go further than that. Seeing that Nero recalled from Britain the victorious Suetonius in 61, and that St. Paul lived with Roman soldiers in all probability from 61 to 63, we may imagine that some soldier or other described to St. Paul that terrible day on which Suetonius made up his mind that he must leave London to its fate. You remember the account of Tacitus[22], so telling in its studied brevity. It is, I think, the first definite appearance of London on the stage of history. The occasion was the revolt of Boadicea, to retain the familiar incorrectness of the name. Colchester had fallen, all the Romans there being slaughtered. The ninth legion had been attacked and routed by the Britons, and all the infantry killed. Many a gallant fight no doubt in the thick woods, like that which Wilson and his comrades fought last month[23]. The governor of the province fled to Gaul. Verulam fell, with great slaughter. There was no taking captive, no selling into slavery. The Britons made sure work; they burned, they tortured, they crucified. One man of the Romans kept his head, or all would have been massacred. With a constancy which made men marvel, Suetonius marched through the midst of foes to the relief of London—London not then illustrious as a colony, but more famous than any other city in the land for the number of its merchants and the abundance of its merchandise. Should he make London his centre of defence? He looked at the small number of his soldiers: he thought of the destruction of the ninth legion. He determined to leave London to its fate. Tears and prayers could not move him. He gave the signal to march. Those of the citizens who accompanied him his soldiers protected. All who remained behind, unable or unwilling to leave their homes, all were overwhelmed in one great slaughter. The Romans calculated that at Colchester, Verulam, and London, from seventy to eighty thousand of Romans and their allies were slain by the enraged Britons