Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/208

 150 ON THE " BELGIC DITCHES, by that phrase the district which the Roman geographers assigned to the Belg?e proper — I should be httle disposed to quarrel with the conclusion the}^ have come to. Nor would I venture summarily to dismiss even the suggestion of Stukeley, that it Mas Divitiacus who here fixed the limits of the Belgic dominion, though I may smile at the etymological trifling by which he endeavours to support his hypothesis. This Divitiacus, Caesar tells us, had been King of the Suessones, and even in his time (nostra etiam memoria) the most powerful chief in all Gaul. He tells us also that Divitiacus had obtained a supremacy not only over a great portion of Belgic Gaul, but also over a great part of Britain — " qui quum magna3 partis harum regionum tum etiam Bri- tannise imperium obtinuerit." By what steps he obtained this supremacy we are not told, but we may surmise that it was with his aid that the Belgse pushed their conquests into the interior of the island, and that the imperium natur- ally followed conquests so extensive and important. The question remains, what was the locality and the real extent of these latter Belgic conquests. If, as is probable, the British king who opposed Caesar belonged to the intrusive race, then the Belga) must have obtained possession of the vale of A^desbury, and the plains of Hertfordshire previous to the year 55, B.C. ; and we may infer that they acquired these districts under the leadershij) of Divitiacus, for we do not learn that Verulam had fallen into the hands of Cassive- launus by any recent act of conquest. There still exist some interesting lines of earthwork, which seem to have been made with a view to separate the new conquests from the country of the Trinobantes. They have been as yet only partially examined, and with very Httle intelligence ; but as the}^ are mixed ujd with another system of boundary -lines, it would require a more lengthened notice than our present hmits will admit of to discuss this question satisfactorily. It is possible that the same monarch who settled the boundaries of the Catyeuchlani — I give the word as it is usually written, without vouching for its correctness — may also have pushed forward the Belgic frontier to the Wans- dike. There are, however, difficulties in the way of such a conclusion which are calculated to shake our faith in the soundness of Stukeley 's hypothesis. Every critical reader will, I think, admit that the Roman geographers and historians