Page:Survey of London by John Stow.djvu/35

Rh Aldburgh, a mile from Boroughbridge, or Watling Street, on Ure river, and others; and no doubt but this city of London was also walled with stone, in the time of the Roman government here, but yet very lately, for it seemeth not to have been walled in the year of our Lord 296, because in that year, when Alectus the tyrant was slain in the field, the Franks easily entered London and had sacked the same, had not God, of his great favour, at the very instant, brought along the river of Thames, certain bands of Roman soldiers, who slew those Franks in every street of the city.

In a few years after, as Simeon of Durham, an ancient writer, reporteth, Helen, the mother of Constantine the Great, was the first that inwalled this city, about the year of Christ 306; but however those walls of stone might have been built by Helen, yet the Britons, I know, had no skill of building with stone, as it may appear by that which followeth, about the year of Christ 399, when Arcadius and Honorius, the sons of Theodosius Magnus, governed the empire, the one in the east, the other in the west; for Honorius having received Britain, the city of Rome was invaded and destroyed by the Goths, after which time the Romans left to rule in Britain, as being employed in defence of their territories nearer home, whereupon the Britons not able to defend themselves against the invasions of their enemies, were many years together under the oppression of two most cruel nations, the Scots and Picts, and at the length were forced to send their ambassadors with letters and lamentable supplications to Rome, requiring aid and succour from thence, upon promise of their continual fealty, so that the Romans would rescue them out of the hands of their enemies. Hereupon the Romans sent unto them a legion of armed soldiers, which coming into this island, and encountering with the enemies, overthrew a great number of them, and drove the rest out of the frontiers of the country; and so setting the Britons at liberty, counselled them to make a wall, extending all along between the two seas, which might be of force to keep out their evil neighbours, and then returned home with great triumph. The Britons wanting masons built that wall, not of stone as they were advised, but made it of turf, and that so slender, that it served little or nothing at all for their defence, and the enemy