Note 1 — BOOK I.

—Page 201, stanza iv.

The Carduel of the Fabliaux is not easily ascertained: it is here identified with Caerleon on the Usk, the favourite residence of Arthur, according to the Welch poets. This must have been a city of no ordinary splendour in the supposed age of Arthur, while still fresh from the hands of the Roman; since, so late as the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his well-known description, speaks as an eye-witness of the many vestiges of its former splendour. "Immense palaces, ornamented with gilded roofs, in imitation of Roman magnificence, a tower of prodigious size, remarkable hot baths, relics of temples," &c. (Giraldus Cambrensis, Sir R. Hoare's translation, vol. i. p. 103.) Geoffrey of Monmouth (1. ix. c. 12) also mentions, admiringly, the gilt roofs of Caerleon, a subject on which he might be a little more accurate than in those other details in his notable chronicle, not drawn from the same ocular experience. The luxurious Romans, indeed, had bequeathed to the chiefs of Britain abodes of splendour and habits of refinement which had no parallel in the Saxon domination. Sir F. Palgrave truly remarks, that even in the fourteenth century the edifices raised in Britain by the Romans were so numerous and costly as almost to excel any others on this side of the Alps. Caerleon (Isca Augusta) was the Roman capital of Siluria, the garrison of the renowned Second or Augustan legion, and the Palatian residence of the Prætor. It was not, however, according to national authority, founded by the Romans, but by the mythical Belin Mawr, three centuries before Cæsar's invasion. It is scarcely necessary to observe, that the dragon was the standard of the Cymry (a word, by the way, which I trust my Welch readers will forgive me for spelling Cymri).