Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/22

14 the last; but they were vanquished with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison. Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When left the country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the Island of Anglesey. came, fifteen or twenty years afterwards, and retook it once more, and devoted seven years to subduing the country, especially that part of it which is now called Scotlan; but, its people, the Caledonians, resisted him at every inch of ground. They fought the bloodiest battles with him; they killed their very wives and children, to prevent his making prisoners of them; they fell, fighting, in such great numbers that certain hills in Scotland are yet supposed to be vast heaps of stones piled up above their graves. came, thirty years afterwards and still they resisted him. came, nearly a hundred years afterwards, and they worried his great army like dogs, and rejoiced to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and swamps. , the son and successor of, did the most to conquer them, for a time; but not by force of arms. He knew how little that would do. He yielded up a quantity of land to the Caledonians, and gave the Britons the same privileges as the Romans possessed. There was peace, after this, for seventy years.

Then new enemies arose. They were, a fierce, seafaring people from the countries to the North of the Rhine, the great river of Germany, on the banks of which the best grapes grow to make the German wine. They began to come, in pirate ships, to the seacoast of Gaul and Britain, and to plunder them. They were repulsed by, a native either of Belgium or of Britain, who was appointed by the Romans to the command, and under whom the Britons first began to fight upon the sea. But, after his time, they renewed their ravages. A few years more, and the Scots (which was then the name for the people of Ireland), and the Picts, a northern people, began to make frequent plundering incursions into the South of Britain. All these attacks were repeated, at intervals, during two hundred years, and through a long succession of Roman Emperors and chiefs; during all which length of time, the Britons rose against the Romans, over and over again. At last, in