That they were needed then
was due to the Saxon pirates. The same pagan robbers, who, when the
Legions left us never to return in the first years of the fifth
century, might seem to have overrun the whole country. Now it seems
fairly certain that Roman Porchester was a military and perhaps a
naval fortress, built not earlier than the fourth century here at the
western extremity of what the Romans called the Litus Saxonicum, and
for the purpose of defending southern Britain from the raids of these
barbarous and pagan rogues. If so, it might seem to be of one piece
with that presumably purely military Way the Stane Street, and to give
it its meaning.
At any rate, the mediaeval builder of Porchester Castle used, with the
help of rebuildings and patchings, the Roman fortifications, which did
not perhaps differ very much, and not at all in form, from those we
see. Roman Porchester was just what mediaeval Porchester was, a great
fortress, not a "city," nor a village, but a port similar to the others
that lined the Saxon shore from the Wash to Beachey Head.
Of what became of the place in Saxon times we are entirely ignorant.
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