attached to the Guildhall Library. The long
subjection to Roman rule had one disastrous effect. It enervated the
people and left them powerless to cope with those enemies who, as soon as
the iron hand of the Roman legions was removed, came forth from their
hiding places to harry the land.

(M8)

Thus it was that when the Picts and Scots again broke loose from their
northern fastnesses and threatened London as they had done before (A.D.
368), they once more appealed for aid to the Roman emperor, by whose
assistance the marauders had formerly been driven back. But times were
different in 446 to what they had been in 368. The Roman empire was itself
threatened with an invasion of the Goths, and the emperor had his hands
too full to allow him to lend a favourable ear to the "groans of the
Britons."(11)

(M9)

Compelled to seek assistance elsewhere, the Britons invited a tribe of
warriors, ever ready to let their services for hire, from the North Sea,
to lend them their aid. The foreigners came in answer to the invitation,
they saw, they conquered; and then they refused to leave an island the
fertility of which they appreciated no less than they despised the
slothfulness of its inhabitants.(12) They turned their weapons against
their employers, and utterly routed them at Crayford, driving them to take
refuge within the walls of London.

(M10)

"A.D. 457 (456). This year Hengist and AEsc [Eric or Ash] his son fought
against the Britons at a place called Creegan-Ford [Crayford] and there
slew four thousand men, and the Britons then forsook Kent, and in great
terror fled to London."(13) So runs the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, and this is
the sole piece of information concerning London it vouchsafes us for one
hundred and fifty years following the departure of the Romans. The
information, scant as it is, serves to show that London had not quite
become a deserted city, nor had yet been devastated as others had been by
the enemy. Its walls still served to afford shelter to the terrified
refugees.

(M11)

When next we read of her, she is in the possession of the East Saxons. How
they came there is a matter for conjecture. It is possible that with the
whole of the surrounding counties in the hands of the enemy, the Londoners
were driven from their city to seek means of subsistence elsewhere, and
that when the East Saxons took possession of it, they found houses and
streets deserted. Little relishing a life within a town, they