which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best
explained as the work of some western Celt who reached Silchester before
its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We do not know the date of
that event, though we may conjecturally put it before, and perhaps a
good many years before, A.D. 500. In any case, an Ogam monument had been
set up before it occurred, and the presence of such an object would seem
to prove that Celtic things had made their way even into this eastern
Romanized town.

[Footnote 1: _Archaeologia_, liv. 233, 441; Rhys and Brynmor Jones,
_Welsh People_, pp. 45, 65; _Victoria Hist. of Hampshire_, i. 279;
_English Hist. Review_, xix. 628. Whether the man who wrote was Irish or
British depends on the answer to the question set forth in the preceding
note. Unfortunately, we do not know when the Ogam script came first into
use. Professor Rhys tells me that the Silchester example may quite
conceivably belong to the fifth century.]

[Illustration: FIG. 21. OGAM INSCRIPTION FROM SILCHESTER.]

But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found in another
fact--that is the destruction of the Romanized part of Britain by the
invading Saxons. War, and especially defensive war against invaders,
must always weaken the higher forms of any country's civilization. Here
the agony was long, and the assailants cruel and powerful, and the
country itself was somewhat weak. Its wealth was easily exhausted. Its
towns were small. Its fortresses were not impregnable. Its leaders were
divided and disloyal. Moreover, the assault fell on the very parts of
Britain which were the seats of Roman culture. Even in the early years
of the fourth century it had been found necessary to defend the coasts
of East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly populated
and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates by a series
of forts which extended from the Wash to Spithead, and were known as the
forts of the Saxon Shore. Fifty or seventy years later the raiders,
whether English seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland,
devastated the coasts of the province and perhaps reached even the
midlands.[1] When, seventy years later still, the English came, no
longer to plunder but to settle, they occupied first the Romanized area
of the island. As the Romano-Britons retired from the south and east, as
Silchester was evacuated in despair[2] and Bath and Wroxeter were
stormed and left desolate, the very centres of Ro