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Post-Roman and English Earthworks. 13 Tamworth, Wareham, Wallingford, possibly Cardiff, though upon a Roman road, and the additions to the Roman works at York. The name Wallingford, "the ford of the Welsh," may be quoted in support of this view. It is difficult to understand how it is that there are no remains in masonry which may be attributed to this period, for it is impossible that with the example of the Romans before their eyes, and a certain admixture of Roman blood in the veins of many of them, the Britons should not have possessed something of the art of construction. This difficulty does not occur in Gaul, whence the Romans were never formally withdrawn. On the Continent indeed, generally, buildings are found of all ages, from the Roman period downwards. Gregory of Tours, in his "Historia Francorum," written towards the end of the sixth century, describes the fortified place of Merliar as of great extent and strength, in which there were included a sweet-water lake, gardens, and orchards ; and M. de Caumont cites a description of an episcopal castle on the Moselle in the same century, which was defended by thirty towers, one of which contained a chapel, and was armed with a balista, and within the place were cultivated lands and a water-mill ; and there were many such, like the defences of Carcassonne, of mixed Roman and post-Roman work, that is, of work executed before and about the fifth century.

In Britain, the course of events was different. The Northmen, men of the sea, and accustomed to life in the open air, had no sympathies with the Celts, and utterly disdained what remained of Roman civilisation ; slaying or driving out the people, and burning and destroying the Roman buildings, which, in consequence, are in England fragmentary, and in most cases only preserved by having been covered up with earth or incorporated into later structures. The Roman works were mostly on too large a scale for the wants of new settlers, and even where these occupied the Roman towns they cared not to restore or complete the walls, but buried what remained of them in high earthen banks, upon which they pitched their palisades, and within which they threw up their moated citadels. The Northmen respected nothing, adopted nothing. Their earliest mission was one of violence and destruction. They appear, in the south and east at least, in a large measure to have slain and driven out the people of the land, and to have abolished such institutions as they possessed. But not the less did they carry with them the seeds of other institutions of a far more vigorous and very healthful character. Whether Saxons, Angles, or Jutes, though landing on the shores of Britain in quite independent