D. 3.—­The spot they selected for resistance was a space shut in by earthworks (agresti aggere) accessible only by one narrow entrance.  This description exactly applies to the locality where we should look for an Icenian Thermopylae.  The clan dwelt, as we have said, in East Anglia, their borders to the south being the marshy course of the Stour, running from the primaeval forest that capped the “East Anglian Heights,” and, to the west, the Cambridgeshire Fens.  They thus lived within a ring fence almost unassailable.  Only in one spot was there an entrance.  Between the Fen and the Forest stretched a narrow strip of open turf, some three or four miles across, affording easy marching.  And along it ran their own great war-path, the Icknield Street, extending from the heart of their realm right away to the Thames at Goring.  It never became a Roman road, though a few miles are now metalled.  Along most of its course it remains what it was in British days, a broad, green track seamed with scores of rut-marks.  And even where it has been obliterated, its course may be traced by the names of Ickborough in Norfolk, Iclingham in Suffolk, Ickleton in Cambridgeshire, and Ickleford in Hertfordshire.[162]

D. 4.—­The Iceni had long ago taken care to fortify this approach to their land.  The whole space between fen and forest in the Cam valley was cut across by four (or five) great dykes which may still be traced, constructed for defence against invaders from the westward.  Of these, the two innermost are far more formidable than the rest, the “Fleam Dyke” near Cambridge, and the “Devil’s Ditch” by Newmarket.  The outer fosse of each is from twenty to thirty feet deep; and the rampart, when topped by a stockade, must have constituted an obstacle to troops unprovided with artillery which the Iceni might justifiably think insuperable.  The “one narrow entrance” along the whole length of the dykes (five miles and ten miles respectively) is where the Icknield Way cuts through them.

D. 5.—­Here then, probably, the Icenian levies confidently awaited the onslaught of Ostorius—­the more confidently inasmuch as he had not waited to call up his legionaries from their winter quarters, but attacked only with the irregulars whom he had been employing against the marauders in the midlands.  The Iceni, doubtless, imagined that such troops would be unequal to assaulting their dyke at all.  But Ostorius was no ordinary leader.  Such was the enthusiasm which he inspired in his troops that they surprised the revolters by attacking along the whole line of the Fleam Dyke at once, and that with such impetuosity that in a moment they were over it.  The hapless Iceni were now caught in a death-trap.  Behind them the Devil’s Ditch barred all retreat save through its one narrow entrance, and those who failed to force their way through the mad crush there could only fight and die with the courage of despair.  “Many a deed of desperate valour did they,” says Tacitus [multa et clara facinora], and the Romans displayed like courage; the son of Ostorius winning in the fray the “civic crown"[163] awarded for the rescue of a Roman citizen.  But no quarter seems to have been given, and the flower of the Icenian tribe perished there to a man.