bade civilians to carry
arms, and bidding them look to their own safety. For now the end had
really come, and the Eternal City itself had been sacked by barbarian
hands. Never before and never since does history record a sacked city
so mildly treated by the conquerors. Heretics as the Visi-goths
were, they never forgot that the vanquished Catholics were their
fellow-Christians, and, barbarians as they were, they left an example
of mercy in victory which puts to the blush much more recent Christian
and civilized warfare.

C. 12.--But, for all that, the moral effect of Alaric's capture of
Rome was portentous, and shook the very foundations of civilization
throughout the world. To Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem, the tidings
came like the shock of an earthquake. Augustine, as he penned his 'De
Civitate Dei,' felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of
Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole elaborate system of
Imperial civil and military government seems to have crumbled to the
ground almost at once. It is noticeable that the rescript of Honorius
is addressed simply to "the cities" of Britain, the local municipal
officers of each several place. No higher authority remained. The
Vicar of Britain, with his staff, the Count and Duke of the
Britains with their soldiery, the Count of the Saxon Shore with his
coastguard,--all were gone. It is possible that, as the deserted
provincials learnt to combine for defence, the Dictators they chose
from time to time to lead the national forces may have derived some
of their authority from the remembrance of these old dignities. "The
dragon of the great Pendragonship,"[363] the tufa of Caswallon
(633), and the purple of Cunedda[364] may well have been derived (as
Professor Rhys suggests) from this source. But practically the history
of Roman Britain ends with a crash at the Fall of Rome.

SECTION D.

Beginning of English Conquest--Vortigern--Jutes in Thanet--Battle of
Stamford--Massacre of Britons--Valentinian III.--Latest Roman coin
found in Britain--Progress of Conquest--The Cymry--Survival of
Romano-British titles--Arturian Romances--Procopius--Belisarius--Roman
claims revived by Charlemagne--The British Empire.

D. 1.--Little remains to be told, and that little rests upon no
contemporary authority known to us. In Gildas, the nearest, writing in
the next century, we find little more than a monotonous threnody over
the awful visitation of the English Conquest, th