m the Roman, and built very few others. Thus the
land was left open to the Danes. Alfred, sensible of this defect,
repaired the walls of London and other cities, and urgently recommended
his nobles and prelates to build fortresses, but could not persuade them.
His great-souled daughter, Elfleda, was the only imitator of his example.
She built eight castles in three years. [286]

It was thus that in a country, in which the general features do not allow
of protracted warfare, the inhabitants were always at the hazard of a
single pitched battle. Subsequent to the Conquest, in the reign of John,
it was, in truth, the strong castle of Dover, on the siege of which
Prince Louis lost so much time, that saved the realm of England from
passing to a French dynasty: and as, in later periods, strongholds fell
again into decay, so it is remarkable to observe how easily the country
was overrun after any signal victory of one of the contending parties.
In this truth, the Wars of the Roses abound with much instruction. The
handful of foreign mercenaries with which Henry VII. won his
crown,--though the real heir, the Earl of Warwick (granting Edward IV.'s
children to be illegitimate, which they clearly were according to the
rites of the Church), had never lost his claim, by the defeat of Richard
at Bosworth;--the march of the Pretender to Derby,--the dismay it spread
throughout England,--and the certainty of his conquest had he
proceeded;--the easy victory of William III. at a time when certainly the
bulk of the nation was opposed to his cause;--are all facts pregnant with
warnings, to which we are as blind as we were in the days of Alfred.

NOTE (L)

The Ruins of Penmaen-mawr.

In Camden's Britannia there is an account of the remarkable relics
assigned, in the text, to the last refuge of Gryffyth ap Llewellyn, taken
from a manuscript by Sir John Wynne in the time of Charles I. In this
account are minutely described, "ruinous walls of an exceeding strong
fortification, compassed with a treble wall, and, within each wall, the
foundations of at least one hundred towers, about six yards in diameter
within the walls. This castle seems (while it stood) impregnable; there
being no way to offer any assault on it, the hill being so very high,
steep, and rocky, and the walls of such strength,--the way or entrance
into it ascending with many turnings, so that one hundred men might
defend themselves against a whole legion; and yet it sho