.
This was done by opening a large ditch round their habitation, which
they filled with water, and which was only approachable by a
draw-bridge. This, in some degree, supplied the defect of the law, and
the want of power in the magistrate. It also, during the iron reign of
priesthood, furnished that table in lent, which it guarded all the year.

The Britons had a very slender knowledge of fortification. The camps
they left us, are chiefly upon eminences, girt by a shallow ditch,
bordered with stone, earth, or timber, but never with water. The moat,
therefore, was introduced by the Romans; their camps are often in
marshes; some wholly, and some in part surrounded by water.

These liquid barriers were begun in England early in the christian aera,
they were in the zenith of their glory at the barons wars, in the reign
of king John, and continued to be the mode of fortification till the
introduction of guns, in the reign of Edward the fourth, which shook
their foundation; and the civil wars of Charles the first totally
annihilated their use, after an existence of twelve hundred years.

Perhaps few parishes, that have been the ancient habitation of a
gentleman, are void of some traces of these fluid bulwarks. That of
Birmingham has three; one of these, of a square form, at Warstone,
erected by a younger brother of the house of Birmingham, hath already
been mentioned; it is fed by a small rivulet from Rotton Park, which
crosses the Dudley Road, near the Sand pits.

Another is the Parsonage house, belonging to St. Martin's, formerly
situated in the road to Bromsgrove, now Smallbrook street, of a circular
figure, and supplied by a neighbouring spring. If we allow this watery
circle to be a proof of the great antiquity of the house, it is a much
greater with regard to the antiquity of the church.

The third is what we simply denominate the Moat, and was the residence
of the ancient lords of Birmingham, situated about sixty yards south of
the church, and twenty west of Digbeth; this is also circular, and
supplied by a small stream that crosses the road to Bromsgrove, near the
first mile stone; it originally ran into the river Rea, near Vaughton's
hole, dividing the parishes of Birmingham and Edgbaston all the way, but
at the formation of the Moat, was diverted from its course, into which
it never returned.

No certain evidence remains to inform us when this liquid work was
accomplished: perhaps in the Saxon heptarchy, when