Caesar, their conqueror, tells us,
{2g} not cultivating much corn, but having large flocks and herds, living
on the milk and flesh of their live stock, and clad in the skins of
these, or of other animals taken in the chase. The well-watered pastures
of the Bain valley would afford excellent grazing for their cattle, while
the extensive forests {2h} of the district around would provide them with
the recreations of the chase, which also helped to make them the skilled
warriors which the Romans found them to be. {3} Much of these forests
remained even down to comparatively recent times, and very large trees
have been dug up, black with age, in fields within four or five miles of
Horncastle, within very recent years, which the present writer has seen.

Such were some of the earlier inhabitants of this locality, leaving their
undoubted traces behind them, but no "local habitation" with a name; for
that we are first indebted to the Romans, who, after finding the Briton a
foe not unworthy of his steel, ultimately subjugated him and found him
not an inapt pupil in Roman arts and civilization. Of the aptitude of
the Briton to learn from his conquerors we have evidence in the fact,
mentioned by the Roman writer Eumenius, that when the Emperor Constantius
wished to rebuild the town Augustodunum (now Antun) in Gaul, about the
end of the 3rd century, he employed workmen chiefly from Britain, such
was the change effected in our "rude forefathers" in 250 years.

We may sum up our remarks on the Britons by saying that in them we have
ancestors of whom we have no occasion to be ashamed. They had a
Christian church more than 300 years before St. Augustine visited our
shores. They yet survive in the sturdy fisher folk of Brittany; in those
stout miners of Cornwall, who in the famed Botallack mine have bored
under the ocean bed, the name Cornwall itself being Welsh (_i.e._
British) for corner land; in the people who occupy the fastnesses of the
Welsh mountains, as well as in the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands and
the Erse of Ireland. Their very speech is blended with our own. Does
the country labourer go to the Horncastle tailor to buy coat and
breeches? His British forefather, though clad chiefly in skins, called
his upper garment his "cotta," his nether covering his "brages," scotice
"breeks." Brewer, _Introduction to Beauties of England_, p. 42.

PART II--THE DIMLY HISTORIC PERIOD.

The headquarters of the Roman forces