rbour from Norway round to Flanders
and swooped down on every vessel or coast settlement they thought they
had a chance of taking. To keep these pirates in check Carausius was
made "Count of the Saxon Shore". It was a case of setting a thief to
catch a thief; for Carausius was a Fleming and a bit of a pirate
himself. He soon became so strong at sea that he not only kept the
other Norsemen off but began to set up as a king on his own account.
He seized Boulogne, harried the Roman shipping on the coasts of France,
and joined forces with those Franks whom the Romans had sent into the
Black Sea to check the Scythians and other wild tribes from the East.
The Franks were themselves Norsemen, who afterwards settled in Gaul and
became the forefathers of the modern French. So Rome was now
threatened by a naval league of hardy Norsemen, from the Black Sea,
through the Mediterranean, and all the way round to that "Saxon Shore"
of eastern Britain which was itself in danger from Norsemen living on
the other side of the North Sea. Once more, however, the Romans won
the day. The Emperor Constantius caught the Franks before they could
join Carausius and smashed their fleet near Gibraltar. He then went to
Gaul and made ready a fleet at the mouth of the Seine, near Le Havre,
which was a British base during the Great War against the Germans.
Meanwhile Carausius was killed by his second-in-command, Allectus, who
sailed from the Isle of Wight to attack Constantius, who himself sailed
for Britain at the very same time. A dense fog came on. The two
fleets never met. Constantius landed. Allectus then followed him
ashore and was beaten and killed in a purely land battle.

This was a little before the year 300; by which time the Roman Empire
was beginning to rot away, because the Romans were becoming softer and
fewer, and because they were hiring more and more strangers to fight
for them, instead of keeping up their own old breed of first-class
fighting men. By 410 Rome itself was in such danger that they took
their last ships and soldiers away from Celtic Britain, which at once
became the prey of the first good fighting men who came that way;
because the Celts, never united enough to make a proper army or navy of
their own, were now weaker than ever, after having had their country
defended by other people for the last four hundred years.

CHAPTER V

THE HARDY NORSEMAN

(449-1066)

The British Empire leads the whole world