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Title: The Romanization of Roman Britain
Author: F. Haverfield
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THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN
by
F. HAVERFIELD
Second Edition, Greatly Enlarged
With Twenty-One Illustrations
Oxford
at the Clarendon Press
1912
[Illustration: HEAD OF GORGON, FROM THE PEDIMENT OF THE TEMPLE OF SUL
MINERVA AT BATH (1/7). (SEE PAGE 42.)]
Henry Frowde
Publisher to the University of Oxford
London, Edinburgh, New York
Toronto And Melbourne
PREFACE
The following paper was originally read to the British Academy in 1905,
and published in the second Volume of its Proceedings (pp. 185-217) and
in a separate form (London, Frowde). The latter has been sometime out of
print, and, as there was apparently some demand for a reprint, the
Delegates of the Press have consented to issue a revised and enlarged
edition. I have added considerably to both text and illustrations and
corrected where it seemed necessary, and I have endeavoured so to word
the matter that the text, though not the footnotes, can be read by any
one who is interested in the subject, without any special knowledge of
Latin.
F. HAVERFIELD.
OXFORD, April 22, 1912
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE
2. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ROMAN BRITAIN
3. ROMANIZATION OF BRITAIN IN LANGUAGE
4. ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION
5. ROMANIZATION IN ART
6. ROMANIZATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-SYSTEM
7. CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION
8. THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG.
Head of Gorgon from Bath. (From a photograph) Frontispiece
1. The Civil and Military Districts of Britain
2, 3, and 4. Inscribed tiles from Silchester. (From photographs)
5. Inscribed tile from Silchester. (From a drawing by Sir E. M.
Thompson)
6. Inscribed tile from Plaxtol, Kent, and reconstruction of lettering.
(From photographs)
7. Ground-plans of Romano-British Temples. (From _Archaeologia_)
8. Ground-plan of Corridor House, Frilford. (From plan by Sir
A. J. Evans)
9. Ground-plan of Roman House at Northleigh, Oxfordshire
10. Plan of a part of Silchester, showing the arrangement of the
private houses and the Forum and Christian Church. (From
_Archaeologia_)
11. Painted pattern on wall-plaster at Silchester.(Restoration by
G. E. Fox in _Archaeologia_)
12. Plan of British Village at Din Lligwy. (From _Archaeologia
Cambrensis_)
13. Late Celtic Metal Work in the British Museum.(From a photograph)
14. Fragments of New Forest pottery with leaf patterns. (From
_Archaeologia_)
15. Urns of Castor Ware. (From photographs)
16. Hunting Scenes from Castor Ware. (From _Artis, Durobrivae_)
17. Fragment of Castor Ware showing Hercules and Hesione. (After
C. R. Smith)
18. The Corbridge Lion. (From a photograph)
19. Dragon-brooches. (From a drawing by C. J. Praetorius)
20. Inscription from Caerwent illustrating Cantonal Government.
(From a drawing)
21. Ogam inscription from Silchester. (From a drawing by C. J.
Praetorius)
Note. For the blocks of the frontispiece, of Figs. 3, 5, 15, 16, I am
indebted to the editor and publishers of the Victoria County History.
Figs. 6, 11, 14, 20, 21, are reproduced from _Archaeologia_ and the
_Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries_. For the block of Fig. 10 I
have to thank the Royal Institute of British Architects; for the block
of Fig. 18, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.
CHAPTER I
THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE
Historians seldom praise the Roman Empire. They regard it as a period of
death and despotism, from which political freedom and creative genius
and the energies of the speculative intellect were all alike excluded.
There is, unquestionably, much truth in this judgement. The world of the
Empire was indeed, as Mommsen has called it, an old world. Behind it lay
the dreams and experiments, the self-convicted follies and disillusioned
wisdom of many centuries. Before it lay no untravelled region such as
revealed itself to our forefathers at the Renaissance or to our fathers
fifty years ago. No new continent then rose up beyond the western seas.
No forgotten literature suddenly flashed out its long-lost splendours.
No vast discoveries of science transformed the universe and the
interpretation of it. The inventive freshness and intellectual
confidence that are born of such things were denied to the Empire. Its
temperament was neither artistic, nor literary, nor scientific. It was
merely practical.
Yet if practical, it was not therefore uncreative. In its own sphere of
everyday life, it was an epoch of growth in many directions. Even the
arts moved forward. Sculpture was enriched by a new and noble style of
portraiture. Architecture won new possibilities by the engineering
genius which reared the aqueduct of Segovia and the Basilica of
Maxentius.[1] But these are only practical expansions of arts that are
in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be
sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we
have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the
researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has broadened
beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House
in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean,
and we have begun to realize the true achievements of the Empire. The
old theory of an age of despotism and decay has been overthrown, and the
believer in human nature can now feel confident that, whatever their
limitations, the men of the Empire wrought for the betterment and the
happiness of the world.
[Footnote 1: Wickhoff, _Wiener Genesis_, p. 10; Riegl, _Stilfragen_, p.
272.]
Their efforts took two forms, the organization of the frontier defences
which repulsed the barbarian, and the development of the provinces
within those defences. The first of these achievements was but for a
time. In the end the Roman legionary went down before the Gothic
horseman. But before he fell he had done his work. In the lands that he
had sheltered, Roman civilization had taken strong root. The fact has an
importance which we to-day might easily miss. It is not likely that any
modern nation will soon again stand in the place that Rome then held.
Our culture to-day seems firmly planted in three continents and our task
is rather to diffuse it further and to develop its good qualities than
to defend it. But the Roman Empire was the civilized world; the safety
of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside was the wild chaos
of barbarism. Rome kept it back from end to end of Europe and across a
thousand miles of western Asia. Through all the storms of barbarian
onset, through the carnage of uncounted wars, through plagues which
struck whole multitudes down to a disastrous death, through civil
discord and sedition and domestic treachery, the work went on. It was
not always marked by special insight or intelligence. The men who
carried it out were not for the most part first-rate statesmen or
first-rate generals. Their successes were those of character, not of
genius. But their phlegmatic courage saved the civilized life of Europe
till that life had grown strong and tenacious, and till even its
assailants had recognized its worth.
It was this growth of internal civilization which formed the second and
most lasting of the achievements of the Empire. Its long and peaceable
government--the longest and most orderly that has yet been granted to
any large portion of the world--gave time for the expansion of Roman
speech and manners, for the extension of the political franchise, the
establishment of city life, the assimilation of the provincial
populations in an orderly and coherent civilization. As the importance
of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large part
of the world grew to be Roman. It has been said that Greece taught men
to be human and Rome made mankind civilized. That was the work of the
Empire; the form it took was Romanization.
This Romanization has its limits and its characteristics. First, in
respect of place. Not only in the further east, where (as in Egypt)
mankind was non-European, but even in the nearer east, where an ancient
Greek civilization reigned, the effect of Romanization was inevitably
small. Closely as Greek civilization resembled Roman, easy as the
transition might seem from the one to the other, Rome met here that most
serious of all obstacles to union, a race whose thoughts and affections
and traditions had crystallized into definite coherent form. That has in
all ages checked Imperial assimilation; it was the decisive hindrance to
the Romanization of the Greek east. A few Italian oases were created by
the establishment of _coloniae_ here and there in Asia Minor and in
Syria. But all of them perished like exotic plants.[1] The Romanization
of these lands was political. Their inhabitants ultimately learnt to
call and to consider themselves Romans. But they did not adopt the Roman
language or the Roman civilization.
[Footnote 1: Mitteis, _Reichsrecht und Volksrecht_, p. 147; Kubitschek,
_Festheft Bormann_ (Wiener Studien, xx. 2), pp. 340 foll.; L. Hahn, _Rom
und Romanismus im griechisch-röm. Osten_ (Leipzig, 1906).]
The west offers a different spectacle. Here Rome found races that were
not yet civilized, yet were racially capable of accepting her culture.
Here, accordingly, her conquests differed from the two forms of conquest
with which modern men are most familiar. We know well enough the rule of
civilized white men over uncivilized Africans, who seem sundered for
ever from their conquerors by a broad physical distinction. We know,
too, the rule of civilized white men over civilized white men--of
Russian (for example) over Pole, where the individualities of two
kindred and similarly civilized races clash in undying conflict. The
Roman conquest of western Europe resembled neither of these. Celt,
Iberian, German, Illyrian, were marked off from Italian by no broad
distinction of race and colour, such as that which marked off Egyptian
from Italian, or that which now divides Englishman from African or
Frenchman from Algerian Arab. They were marked off, further, by no
ancient culture, such as that which had existed for centuries round the
Aegean. It was possible, it was easy, to Romanize these western peoples.
Even their geographical position helped, though somewhat indirectly, to
further the process. Tacitus two or three times observes that the
western provinces of the Empire looked out on no other land to the
westward and bordered on no free nations. That is one half of a larger
fact which influenced the whole history of the Empire. Round the west
lay the sea and the Sahara. In the east were wide lands and powerful
states and military dangers and political problems and commercial
opportunities. The Empire arose in the west and in Italy, a land that,
geographically speaking, looks westward. But it was drawn surely, if
slowly, to the east. Throughout the first three centuries of our era, we
can trace an eastward drift--of troops, of officials, of government
machinery--till finally the capital itself is no longer Rome but
Byzantium. All the while, in the undisturbed security of the west,
Romanization proceeded steadily.
The advance of this Romanization followed manifold lines. The Roman
government gave more or less direct encouragement, particularly in two
ways. It increased the Roman or Romanized population of the provinces
during the earlier Empire by establishing time-expired soldiers--men who
spoke Latin and who were citizens of Rome[1]--in provincial
municipalities (_coloniae_). It allured provincials themselves to adopt
Roman civilization by granting the franchise and other privileges to
those who conformed. Neither step need be ascribed to any idealism on
the part of the rulers. _Coloniae_ served as instruments of repression
as well as of culture, at least in the first century of the Empire. When
Cicero[2] describes a _colonia_, founded under the Republic in southern
Gaul, as 'a watch-tower of the Roman people and an outpost planted to
confront the Gaulish tribes', he states an aspect of such a town which
obtained during the earlier Empire no less than in the Republican age.
Civilized men, again, are always more easily ruled than savages.[3] But
the result was in any case the same. The provincials became Romanized.
[Footnote 1: English writers sometimes adduce the provincial origins of
the soldiers as proofs that they were unromanized. The conclusion is
unjustifiable. The legionaries were throughout recruited from places
which were adequately Romanized. The auxiliaries, though recruited from
less civilized districts, and though to some extent tribally organized
in the early Empire, were denationalized after A.D. 70, and non-Roman
elements do not begin to recur in the army till later. Tiberius _militem
Graece testimonium interrogatum nisi Latine respondere vetuit_ (Suet.
_Tib._ 71).]
[Footnote 2: Cic. _pro Font._ 13. Compare Tacitus, _Ann._ xii. 27 and
32, _Agr._ 14 and 32.]
[Footnote 3: Tacitus emphasizes this point. _Agr._ 21 _ut homines
dispersi ac rudes, eoque in bella faciles, quieti et otio per voluptates
adsuescerent, hortari privatim adiuvare publice ut templa fora domos
exstruerent.... Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars
servitutis esset._]
No less important results followed from unofficial causes. The legionary
fortresses collected settlers--traders, women, veterans--under the
shelter of their ramparts, and their _canabae_ or 'bazaars', to use an
Anglo-Indian term, formed centres of Roman speech and life, and often
developed into cities. Italians, especially of the upper-middle class,
merchants and others,[1] emigrated freely and formed tiny Roman
settlements, often in districts where no troops were stationed. Chances
opened at Rome for able provincials who became Romanized. Above all, the
definite and coherent civilization of Italy took hold of uncivilized but
intelligent men, while the tolerance of Rome, which coerced no one into
conformity, made its culture the more attractive because it seemed the
less inevitable.
[Footnote 1: The best parallel to the Italian emigration to the
provinces during the late Republic and early Empire is perhaps to be
found in the mediaeval German emigrations to Galicia and parts of
Hungary (the Siebenbürgen Saxons are an exception), which Professor R.F.
Kaindl has so well and minutely described. The present day mass
emigration of the lower classes is something quite distinct.]
The process is hard to follow in detail, since datable evidence is
scanty. In general, however, the instances of really native fashions or
speech which are recorded from this or that province belong to the early
Empire. To that age we can assign not only the Celtic, Iberian, and
Punic inscriptions which we find occasionally in Gaul, Spain, and
Africa, but also the use of the native titles like Vergobret or Suffete,
and the retention of native personal names and of that class of Latin
_nomina_, like Lovessius, which are formed out of native names. In the
middle Empire such things are rarer. Exceptions naturally meet us here
and there. Punic was in almost official use in towns like Gigthis in the
Syrtis region in the second century, and Punic-speaking clergy, it
appears, were needed in some of the villages of fourth-century Africa.
Celtic is stated to have been in use at the same epoch among the Treveri
of eastern Gaul--presumably in the great woodlands of the Ardennes, the
Eifel and the Hunsrück.[1] Basque was obviously in use throughout the
Roman period in the valleys of the Pyrenees. So in Asia Minor, where
Greek was the dominant tongue, six or seven other dialects, Galatian,
Phrygian, Lycaonian, and others, lived on till a very late date,
especially (as it seems) on the uncivilized pastoral areas of the
Imperial domain-lands.[2] Some of these are survivals, noted at the time
as exceptional, and counting in the scales of history for no more than
the survival of Greek in a few modern villages of southern Italy or the
Wendish oasis seventy miles from Berlin. Others are more serious facts.
But they do not alter the main position. In most regions of the west the
Latin tongue obviously prevailed. It was, indeed, powerful enough to
lead the Christian Church to insist on its use, and not, as in Syria and
Egypt, to encourage native dialects.[3]
[Footnote 1: Jerome, _Comment. in epist. ad Galatas_, ii. 3. His
assertion has, however, met with much scepticism in modern times, and it
must be admitted that he was not a very accurate writer.]
[Footnote 2: K. Holl, _Hermes_, xliii. 240-54; William M. Ramsay,
_Oesterr. Jahreshefte_, viii. (1905), 79-120, quoting, amongst other
things, a neo-phrygian text of A.D. 259; W.M. Calder, _Hellenic
Journal_, xxxi. 161.]
[Footnote 3: Mommsen (_Röm. Gesch._ v. 92) ascribes the final extinction
of Celtic in northern Gaul to the influence of the Church. But the
Church was not in itself averse to native dialects, and its insistence
on Latin in the west may well be due rather to the previous diffusion of
the language.]
In material culture the Romanization advanced no less quickly. One
uniform fashion spread from the Mediterranean throughout central and
western Europe, driving out native art and substituting a
conventionalized copy of Graeco-Roman or Italian art, which is
characterized alike by its technical finish and neatness, and by its
lack of originality and its dependence on imitation. The result was
inevitable. The whole external side of life was lived amidst Italian, or
(as we may perhaps call it) Roman-provincial, furniture and environment.
Take by way of example the development of the so-called 'Samian' ware.
The original manufacture of this (so far as we are here concerned) was
in Italy at Arezzo. Early in the first century Gaulish potters began to
copy and compete with it; before long the products of the Arretine kilns
had vanished even from the Italian market. Western Europe henceforward
was supplied with its 'best china' from provincial and mainly from
Gaulish sources. The character of the ware supplied is significant. It
was provincial, but it was in no sense unclassical. It drew many of its
details from other sources than Arezzo, but it drew them all from Greece
or Rome. Nothing either in the manner or in the matter of its decoration
recalled native Gaul. Throughout, it is imitative and conventional, and,
as often happens in a conventional art, items are freely jumbled
together which do not fit into any coherent story or sequence. At its
best, it is handsome enough: though its possibilities are limited by its
brutal monochrome, it is no discredit to the civilization to which it
belongs. But it reveals unmistakably the Roman character of that
civilization.
The uniformity of this civilization was crossed by local variations, but
these do not contradict its Roman character. If the provincial felt
sometimes the claims of his province and raised a cry that sounds like
'Africa for the Africans' he acted on a geographical, not on any native
or national idea. He was demanding individual life for a Roman section
of the Empire. He was anticipating, perhaps, the birth of new nations
out of the Romanized populations. He was not attempting to recall the
old pre-Roman system. Similarly, if his art or architecture embodies
native fashions or displays a local style, if special types of houses or
of tombstones or sculpture occur in special districts, that does not mar
the result. These are not efforts to regain an earlier native life. They
are not the enemies of Roman culture, but its children--sometimes,
indeed, its adopted children--and they signify the birth of new Roman
fashions.
It remains true, of course, that, till a language or a custom is wholly
dead and gone, it can always revive under special conditions. The rustic
poor of a country seldom affect the trend of its history. But they have
a curious persistent force. Superstitions, sentiments, even language and
the consciousness of nationality, linger dormant among them, till an
upheaval comes, till buried seeds are thrown out on the surface and
forgotten plants blossom once more. The world has seen many examples of
such resurrection--not least in modern Europe. The Roman Empire offers
us singularly few instances, but it would be untrue to say that there
were none.
But while it is true generally that Romanization spread rapidly in the
west, we must admit great differences between different districts even
of the same provincial areas. Some grew Romanized soon and thoroughly,
others slowly and imperfectly. For instance, Gallia Comata, that is,
Gaul north and west of the Cevennes, contrasted sharply in this respect
with Narbonensis, the province of the Mediterranean coast and the Rhone
Valley. This latter, even in the first century A.D., had become _Italia
verius quam provincia_. The other lagged behind. Neither the Latin
speech nor the Latin forms of municipal government became quickly
common. Yet even in northern Gaul Romanization strode forward. The
Gaulish monarchy of A.D. 258-73 shows us the position north of the
Cevennes just after the middle of the third century. In it Roman and
native elements were mixed. Its emperors were called not only Latinius
Postumus, but also Piavonius and Esuvius Tetricus. Its coins were
inscribed not only 'Romae Aeternae', but also 'Herculi Deusoniensi' and
'Herculi Magusano'. It not only claimed independence of Rome or perhaps
equality with it, but it aspired to be the Empire. It had its own
senate, copied from that of Rome; _tribunicia potestas_ was conferred on
its ruler and the title _princeps iuventutis_ on its heir apparent. At
that date it was still possible for a Gaulish ruler to bear a Gaulish
name and to appeal to some sort of native memories. But the appeal was
made without any sense that it was incompatible with a general
acceptance of Roman fashions, language, and constitution. Postumus, if
he had had the chance, would have made himself Emperor of Rome. Though
the native element in Gaul had not died out of mind, at any rate its
opposition to the Roman had become forgotten. It had become little more
than a picturesque and interesting contrast to the all-absorbing Roman
element. A hundred and thirty years later it had almost wholly vanished.
Such is the historical situation to which we must adjust our views of
any single province in the western Empire. Two main conclusions may here
be emphasized. First, Romanization in general extinguished the
distinction between Roman and provincial, alike in politics, in material
culture, and in language. Secondly, it did not everywhere and at once
destroy all traces of tribal or national sentiments or fashions. These
remained, at least for a while and in a few districts, not so much in
active opposition as in latent persistence, capable of resurrection
under the proper conditions. In such cases the provincial had become a
Roman. But he could still undergo an atavistic reversion to the ancient
ways of his forefathers.
CHAPTER II
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ROMAN BRITAIN
One western province seems to form an exception to the general rule. In
Britain, as it is described by the majority of English writers, we have
a province in which Roman and native were as distinct as modern
Englishman and Indian, and 'the departure of the Romans' in the fifth
century left the Britons almost as Celtic as their coming had found
them. The adoption of this view may be set down, I think, to various
reasons which have, in themselves, little to do with the subject. The
older archaeologists, familiar with the early wars narrated by Caesar
and Tacitus, pictured the whole history of the island as consisting of
such struggles. Later writers have been influenced by the analogies of
English rule in India. Still more recently, the revival of Welsh
national sentiment has inspired a hope, which has become a belief, that
the Roman conquest was an episode, after which an unaltered Celticism
resumed its interrupted supremacy. These considerations have, plainly
enough, very little value as history, and the view which is based on
them seems to me in large part mistaken. As I have pointed out, it is
not the view which is suggested by a consideration of the general
character of the western provinces. Nor do I think that it is the view
which agrees best with the special evidence which we possess in respect
of Britain. In the following paragraphs I propose to examine this
evidence. I shall adopt an archaeological rather than a legal or a
philological standpoint. The legal and philological arguments have often
been put forward. But the legal arguments are entirely _a priori_, and
they have led different scholars to very different conclusions. The
philological arguments are no less beset with difficulties. Both the
facts and their significance are obscure, and the inquiry into them has
hitherto yielded little beyond confident and yet wholly contradictory
assertions and theories which are not susceptible of proof. The
archaeological evidence, on the other hand, is definite and consistent,
and perhaps deserves fuller notice than it has yet received. It
illuminates, not only the material civilization, but also the language
and to some extent even the institutions of Roman Britain, and supplies,
though imperfectly, the facts which our legal and philological arguments
do not yield.
I need not here insert a sketch of Roman Britain. But I may call
attention to three of its features which are not seldom overlooked. In
the first place, it is necessary to distinguish the two halves of the
province, the one the northern and western uplands occupied only by
troops, and the other the eastern and southern lowlands which contained
nothing but purely civilian life.[1] The two are marked off, not in law
but in practical fact, almost as fully as if one had been _domi_ and the
other _militiae_. We shall not seek for traces of Romanization in the
military area. There neither towns existed nor villas. Northwards, no
town or country-house has been found beyond the neighbourhood of
Aldborough (Isurium), some fifteen miles north-west of York. Westwards,
on the Welsh frontier, the most advanced town was at Wroxeter
(Viroconium), near Shrewsbury, and the furthest country-house an
isolated dwelling at Llantwit, in Glamorgan.[2] In the south-west the
last house was near Lyme Regis, the last town at Exeter.[3] These are
the limits of the Romanized area. Outside of them, the population cannot
have acquired much Roman character, nor can it have been numerous enough
to form more than a subsidiary factor in our problem. But within these
limits were towns and villages and country-houses and farms, a large
population, and a developed and orderly life.
[Footnote 1: For further details see the Victoria County Histories of
_Northamptonshire_, i. 159, and _Derbyshire_, i. 191. To save frequent
references, I may say here that much of the evidence for the following
paragraphs is to be found in my articles on Romano-British remains
printed in the volumes of this History. I am indebted to its publishers
for leave to reproduce several illustrations from its pages. For others
I refer my readers to the History itself.]
[Footnote 2: See my _Military Aspects of Roman Wales_, notes 60 and 82.
There was some sort of town life at Carmarthen.]
[Footnote 3: The Roman remains discovered west of Exeter are few and
mostly later than A.D. 250. No town or country-house or farm or stretch
of roadway has ever been found here. The list of discoveries includes
only one early settlement on Plymouth harbour, another near Bodmin, of
small size, and a third, equally small and of uncertain date, on Padstow
harbour; some scanty vestiges of tin-mining, principally late; two
milestones (if milestones they be) of the early fourth century, the one
at Tintagel church and the other at St. Hilary; and some scattered
hoards and isolated bits. Portions of the country were plainly
inhabited, but the inhabitants did not learn Roman ways, like those who
lived east of the Exe. Even tin-mining was not pursued very actively
till a comparatively late period, though the Bodmin settlement may be
connected with tin-works close by.]
[Illustration: FIG. 1. THE CIVIL AND MILITARY DISTRICTS OF BRITAIN.]
Secondly, the distribution of civilian life, even in the lowlands, was
singularly uneven. It is not merely that some districts were the special
homes of wealthier residents. We have also to conceive of some parts as
densely peopled and of some as hardly inhabited. Portions of Kent,
Sussex, and Somerset are set thick with country-houses and similar
vestiges of Romano-British life. But other portions of the same
counties, southern Kent, northern Sussex, western Somerset, show very
few traces of any settled life at all. The midland plain, and in
particular Warwickshire,[1] seems to have been the largest of these
'thin spots'. Here, among great woodlands and on damp and chilly clay,
there dwelt not merely few civilized Roman-Britons, but few occupants of
any sort.
[Footnote 1: _Victoria Hist. of Warwickshire_, i. 228.]
And lastly, Romano-British life was on a small scale. It was, I think,
normal in quality and indeed not very dissimilar from that of many parts
of Gaul. But it was in any case defective in quantity. We find towns in
Britain, as elsewhere, and farms or country-houses. But the towns are
small and somewhat few, and the country-houses indicate comfort more
often than wealth. The costlier objects of ordinary use, fine mosaics,
precious glass, gold and silver ornaments, occur comparatively
seldom.[1] We have before us a civilization which, like a man whose
constitution is sound rather than strong, might perish quickly from a
violent shock.
[Footnote 1: See my remarks in Traill's _Social England_ (illustrated
edition, 1901), i. 141-61.]
CHAPTER III
ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE
We may now proceed to survey the actual remains. They may seem scanty,
but they deserve examination.
First, in respect of language. Even before the Claudian conquest of A.D.
43, British princes had begun to inscribe their coins with Latin words.
These legends are not merely blind and unintelligent copies, like the
imitations of Roman legends on the early English _sceattas_. The word
most often used, REX, is strange to the Roman coinage, and must have
been employed with a real sense of its meaning. After A.D. 43, Latin
advanced rapidly. No Celtic inscription occurs, I believe, on any
monument of the Roman period in Britain, neither cut on stone nor
scratched on tile or potsherd, and this fact is the more noteworthy
because, as I shall point out below, Celtic inscriptions are not at all
unknown in Gaul. On the other hand, Roman inscriptions occur freely in
Britain. They are less common than in many other provinces, and they
abound most in the military region. But they appear also in towns and
country-houses, and some of the instances are significant.
The town site that we can best examine for our present purpose is
Calleva or Silchester, ten miles south of Reading, which has been
completely excavated with care and thoroughness. Here a few fairly
complete inscriptions on stone have been discovered, and many fragments
of others, which prove that the public language of the town was
Latin.[1] The speech of ordinary conversation is equally well
attested by smaller inscribed objects, and the evidence is remarkable,
since it plainly refers to the lower class of Callevans. When a weary
brick-maker scrawls SATIS with his finger on a tile, or some prouder
spirit writes CLEMENTINVS FECIT TVBVL(_um_) (Clementinus made this
box-tile), when a bit of Samian is marked FVR--presumably as a warning
from the servants of one house to those of the next--or a rude brick
shows the word PVELLAM--probably part of an amatory sentence otherwise
lost--or another brick gives a Roman date, the 'sixth day before the
Calends of October', we may be sure that the lower classes of Calleva
used Latin alike at their work and in their more frivolous moments
(Figs. 2, 3, 4). When we find a tile scratched over with cursive
lettering--possibly part of a writing lesson--which ends with a tag from
the _Aeneid_, we recognize that not even Vergil was out of place
here.[2] The Silchester examples are so numerous and remarkable that
they admit of no other interpretation.[3]
[Footnote 1: For these and for the following _graffiti_ see my account
in the _Victoria History of Hampshire_, i. 275, 282-4. For the
'Clementinus' tile (discovered since) see _Archaeologia_, lviii. 30.
Silchester lies in a stoneless country, so that stone inscriptions would
naturally be few and would easily be used up for later building.
Moreover, its cemeteries have not yet been explored, and only one
tombstone has come accidentally to light.]
[Footnote 2: Sir E.M. Thompson, _Greek and Latin Palaeography_ (1894),
p. 211, first suggested this explanation; _Eph._ ix. 1293.]
[Footnote 3: To call them--as did a kindly Belgian critic of this paper
in its first published form--'un nombre de faits trop peu considérable'
is really to misstate the case.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2. ... _puellam_.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3. _Fecit tubul(um) Clementinus_.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4. _vi K(alendas) Oct(obres)_....]
[Illustration: FIGS. 2, 3, 4. GRAFFITI ON TILES FROM SILCHESTER. (P.
25.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 5. GRAFFITO ON A TILE FOUND AT SILCHESTER (P. 25).
_Pertacus perfidus campester Lucilianus Campanus conticuere omnes._
(Probably a writing lesson.)]
I have heard this conclusion doubted on the ground that a bricklayer or
domestic servant in a province of the Roman Empire would not have known
how to read and write. This doubt really rests on a misconception of the
Empire. It is, indeed, akin to the surprise which tourists often exhibit
when confronted with Roman remains in an excavation or a museum--a
surprise that 'the Romans' had boots, or beds, or waterpipes, or
fireplaces, or roofs over their heads. There are, in truth, abundant
evidences that the labouring man in Roman days knew how to read and
write at need, and there is much truth in the remark that in the lands
ruled by Rome education was better under the Empire than at any time
since its fall till the nineteenth century.
It has, indeed, been suggested by doubters, that these _graffiti_ were
written by immigrant Italians, working as labourers or servants in
Calleva. The suggestion does not seem probable. Italians certainly
emigrated to the provinces in considerable numbers, just as Italians
emigrate to-day. But we have seen above that the ancient emigrants were
not labourers, as they are to-day. They were traders, or dealers in
land, or money-lenders or other 'well-to-do' persons. The labourers and
servants of Calleva must be sought among the native population, and the
_graffiti_ testify that this population wrote Latin. It is a further
question whether, besides writing Latin, the Callevan servants and
workmen may not also have spoken Celtic. Here direct evidence fails. In
the nature of things, we cannot hope for proof of the negative
proposition that Celtic was not spoken in Silchester. But all
probabilities suggest that it was, at any rate, spoken very little. In
the twenty years' excavation of the site, no Celtic inscription has
emerged. Instead, we have proof that the lower classes wrote Latin for
all sorts of purposes. Had they known Celtic well, it is hardly credible
that they should not have sometimes written in that language, as the
Gauls did across the Channel. A Gaulish potter of Roman date could
scrawl his name and record, _Sacrillos avot_, 'Sacrillus potter', on the
outside of a mould.[1] No such scrawl has ever been found in Britain.
The Gauls, again, could invent a special letter Ð to denote a special
Celtic sound and keep it in Roman times. No such letter was used in
Roman Britain, though it occurs on earlier British coins. This total
absence of written Celtic cannot be a mere accident.
[Footnote 1: One example is _Sacrillos avot form._, suggesting a
bilingual sentence such as we find in some Cornish documents of the
period when Cornish was definitely giving way to English. Another
example, _Valens avoti_ (Déchelette, _Vases céramiques_, i. 302),
suggests the same stage of development in a different way.]
No other Romano-British town has been excavated so extensively or so
scientifically as Silchester. None, therefore, has yielded so much
evidence. But we have no reason to consider Silchester exceptional in
its character. Such scraps as we possess from other sites point to
similar Romanization elsewhere. FVR, for instance, recurs on a potsherd
from the Romano-British country town at Dorchester in Dorset. A set of
tiles dug up in the ruins of a country-house at Plaxtol, in Kent, bear a
Roman inscription impressed by a rude wooden stamp (Fig. 6).[1] In
short, all the _graffiti_ on potsherds or tiles that are known to me as
found in towns or country-houses are equally Roman. Larger inscriptions,
cut on stone, have also been found in country-houses. On the whole the
general result is clear. Latin was employed freely in the towns of
Britain, not only on serious occasions or by the upper classes, but by
servants and work-people for the most accidental purposes. It was also
used, at least by the upper classes, in the country. Plainly there did
not exist in the towns that linguistic gulf between upper class and
lower class which can be seen to-day in many cities of eastern Europe,
where the employers speak one language and the employed another. On the
other hand, it is possible that a different division existed, one which
is perhaps in general rarer, but which can, or could, be paralleled in
some Slavonic districts of Austria-Hungary. That is, the townsfolk of
all ranks and the upper class in the country may have spoken Latin,
while the peasantry may have used Celtic. No actual evidence has been
discovered to prove this. We may, however, suggest that it is not, in
itself, an impossible or even an improbable linguistic division of Roman
Britain, even though the province did not contain any such racial
differences as those of German, Pole, Ruthene and Rouman which lend so
much interest to Austrian towns like Czernowitz.
[Footnote 1: _Proc. Soc. Antiq. London_, xxiii. 108; _Eph._ ix. 1290.]
[Illustration: FIG. 6. FRAGMENT OF INSCRIBED TILE FROM PLAXTOL AND
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE INSCRIPTION FROM VARIOUS FRAGMENTS. (The letters
were impressed by a wooden cylinder with incised lettering, which was
rolled over the tile while still soft. In the reconstruction CAB in line
2 and IT in line 3 are included twice, to show the method of
repetition.)]
It remains to cite the literary evidence, distinct if not abundant, as
to the employment of Latin in Britain. Agricola, as is well known,
encouraged the use of it, with the result (says Tacitus) that the
Britons, who had hitherto hated and refused the foreign tongue, became
eager to speak it fluently. About the same time Plutarch, in his tract
on the cessation of oracles, mentions one Demetrius of Tarsus,
grammarian, who had been teaching in Britain (A.D. 80), and mentions him
as nothing at all out of the ordinary course.[1] Forty years later,
Juvenal alludes casually to British lawyers taught by Gaulish
schoolmasters. It is plain that by the second century Latin must have
been spreading widely in the province. We need not feel puzzled about
the way in which the Callevan workman of perhaps the third or fourth
century learnt his Latin.
[Footnote 1: See Dessau, _Hermes_, xlvi. 156.]
At this point we might wish to introduce the arguments deducible from
philology. We might ask whether the phonetics or the vocabulary of the
later Celtic and English languages reveal any traces of the influence of
Latin, as a spoken tongue, or give negative testimony to its absence.
Unfortunately, the inquiry seems almost hopeless. The facts are obscure
and open to dispute, and the conclusions to be drawn from them are quite
uncertain. Dogmatic assertions proceeding from this or that philologist
are common enough. Trustworthy results are correspondingly scarce. One
instance may be cited in illustration. It has been argued that the name
'Kent' is derived from the Celtic 'Cantion', and not from the Latin
'Cantium', because, according to the rules of Vulgar Latin, 'Cantium'
would have been pronounced 'Cantsium' in the fifth century, when the
Saxons may be supposed to have learnt the name. That is, Celtic was
spoken in Kent about 450. Yet it is doubtful whether Latin 'ti' had
really come to be pronounced 'tsi' in Britain so early as A.D. 450. And
it is plainly possible that the Saxons may have learnt the name long
years before the reputed date of Hengist and Horsa. The Kentish coast
was armed against them and the organization of the 'Saxon Shore'
established about A.D. 300. Their knowledge of the place-name may be at
least as old. No other difficulty seems to hinder the derivation of
'Kent' from the form 'Cantium', and the whole argument based on the name
thus collapses. It is impossible here to go through the whole list of
cases which have been supposed to be parallel in their origin to 'Kent',
nor should I, with a scanty knowledge of the subject, be justified in
such an attempt. I have selected this particular example because it has
been emphasized by a recent writer.[1]
[Footnote 1: Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, p. 102. I am indebted
to Mr. W.H. Stevenson for help in relation to these philological
points.]
CHAPTER IV
ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION
From language we pass to material civilization. Here is a far wider
field of evidence, provided by buildings, private or public, their
equipment and furniture, and the arts and small artistic or decorative
objects. On the whole this evidence is clear and consistent. The
material civilization of the province, the external fabric of its life,
was Roman, in Britain as elsewhere in the west. Native elements
succumbed almost wholesale to the conquering foreign influence. In
regard to public buildings this is natural enough. Before the Claudian
conquest the Britons can hardly have possessed large structures in
stone, and the provision of them necessarily came in with the Romans.
The _fora_, basilicas, and public baths, such as have been discovered at
Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, follow Roman models and resemble
similar buildings in other provinces. The temples show something more of
a local pattern (Fig. 7), which occurs also in northern Gaul and on the
Rhine, but this pattern seems merely a variation of a classical type.[1]
The characteristics of the private houses are more complicated. Their
ground-plans show us types which, like the temples just mentioned, recur
in northern Gaul as well as Britain, but which differ even more than the
temples from the similar buildings in Italy, or indeed in the
Mediterranean provinces of the Empire. The houses of Italy and of the
south generally were constructed to look inwards upon open _impluvia_,
colonnaded courts and garden plots, and, as befitted a hot climate, they
had few outer windows. Moreover, they could be easily built side by side
so as to form, as at Pompeii, the continuous streets of a town. The
houses of Britain and northern Gaul looked outwards on to the
surrounding country. Their rooms were generally arranged in straight
rows along a corridor or cloister. Sometimes they had only one row of
rooms (Corridor House, Fig. 8); sometimes they enclosed two or three
sides of a large open yard (Courtyard House, Fig. 9); a third type
somewhat resembles a yard with rooms at each end of it. In any case they
were singularly ill-suited to stand side by side in a town street. When
we find them grouped together in a town, as at Silchester and
Caerwent--the only two examples of Roman towns in Britain of which we
have real knowledge--they are dotted about more like the cottages in an
English village than anything that recalls a real town (Fig. 10).
[Footnote 1: British examples have been noted at Silchester and
Caerwent, and in many scattered sites in rural districts. For Gaulish
instances, see Léon de Vesly, _Les Fana de région Normande_ (Rouen,
1909); for Germany, _Bonner Jahrbücher_, 1876, p. 57, Hettner, _Drei
Tempelbezirke im Trevirerlande_ (Trier, 1901), and _Trierer
Jahresberichte_, iii. 49-66. The English writers who have published
accounts of these structures have tended to ignore their special
character.]
[Illustration: FIG. 7. GROUND-PLANS OF ROMANO-BRITISH TEMPLES. CAERWENT
AND SILCHESTER.]
[Illustration: FIG. 8. GROUND-PLAN OF A SMALL CORRIDOR HOUSE FROM
FRILFORD, BERKSHIRE.
(_From plan by Sir A.J. Evans._)]
[Illustration: FIG. 9. COURTYARD HOUSE AT NORTHLEIGH, OXFORDSHIRE,
EXCAVATED IN 1815-16. (Room 1, chief mosaic with hypocaust; rooms 8-18,
mosaic floors; rooms 21-7 and 38-43, baths, &c. Recent excavations show
that this plan represents the house in its third and latest stage. See
p. 31.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. DETAILED PLAN OF PART OF SILCHESTER. Showing the
arrangement of the private houses and the Forum and Christian Church.
(_From the plan issued by the Society of Antiquaries._) (See p. 31.)]
The origin of these northern house-types has been much disputed. English
writers tend to regard them as embodying a Celtic form of house;
German archaeologists try to derive them from the 'Peristyle houses'
built round colonnaded courts in Roman Africa and in the east. It may be
admitted that the influence of this class of house has not infrequently
affected builders in Roman Britain. But the differences between the
British 'Courtyard house' and that of the south are very considerable.
In particular, the amount of ground covered by the courts differs
entirely in the two kinds of houses, while for the British houses of the
plainer 'corridor' type the Mediterranean lands offer no analogies. We
cannot find in them either _atrium_ or _impluvium_, _tablinum_ or
peristyle, such as we find in Italy, and we must suppose them to be
Roman modifications of really Celtic originals. This, however, no more
implies that their occupants were mere Celts than the use of a bungalow
in India proves the inhabitant to be a native Indian.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Vict. Hist. Somerset_, i. 213-14. A few Romano-British
houses at Silchester (_in insula_ xiv. (1), see _Archaeologia_, lv. 221)
and at Caerwent (house No. 3, see _Arch._ lvii, plate 40) do bear some
resemblance to the Mediterranean type, as I have observed in _Archaeol.
Anzeiger_, 1902, p. 105. But they stand alone. Similarly, parallels may
be drawn between Pompeian wall-paintings of houses and certain 'villa'
remains in western Germany, as at Nennig; see Rostowzew, _Archaeol.
Jahrbuch_, 1904, p. 103. But these again seem to me the exception.]
The point is made clearer by the character of the internal fittings, for
these are wholly borrowed from Italian sources. If we cannot find in the
Romano-British house either _atrium_ or _impluvium_, _tablinum_ or
peristyle, such as we find regularly in Italy, we have none the less the
painted wall-plaster (Fig. 11) and mosaic floors, the hypocausts and
bath-rooms of Italy. The wall-paintings and mosaics may be poorer in
Britain, the hypocausts more numerous; the things themselves are those
of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has ever come to light in the whole
of Roman Britain which represents any local subject or contains any
unclassical feature. The usual ornamentation consists either of
mythological scenes, such as Orpheus charming the animals, or Apollo
chasing Daphne, or Actaeon rent by his hounds, or of geometrical
devices like the so-called Asiatic shields which are purely of classical
origin.[1] Perhaps we may detect in Britain a special fondness for the
cable or guilloche pattern, and we may conjecture that from
Romano-British mosaics it passed in a modified form into Later Celtic
art. But the ornament itself, whether in single border or in
many-stranded panels of plaitwork, occurs not rarely in Italy as well as
in thoroughly Romanized lands like southern Spain and southern Gaul and
Africa, and also in Greece and Asia Minor. It is a classical, not a
British pattern.
[Footnote 1: It has been suggested that these mosaics were principally
laid by itinerant Italians. The idea is, of course, due to modern
analogies. It does not seem quite impossible, since the work is in a
sense that of an artist, and the pay might have been high enough to
attract stray decorators of good standing from the Continent. However,
no evidence exists to prove this or even to make it probable. The
mosaics of Roman Britain, with hardly an exception, are such as might
easily be made in a province which was capable of exporting skilled
workmen to Gaul (p. 57). They have also the appearance of imitative work
copied from patterns rather than of designs sketched by artists. It is
most natural to suppose that, like the Gaulish Samian ware--which is
imitative in just the same fashion--they are local products.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11. RESTORATION OF PAINTED PATTERN ON WALL-PLASTER
AT SILCHESTER. Showing a purely conventional style based on classical
models. (P. 34.) (_From Archaeologia._)]
Nor is the Roman fashion of house-fittings confined to the mansions of
the wealthy. Hypocausts and painted stucco, copied, though crudely, from
Roman originals, have been discovered in poor houses and in mean
villages.[1] They formed part, even there, of the ordinary environment
of life. They were not, as an eminent writer[2] calls them, 'a delicate
exotic varnish.' Indeed, I cannot recognize in our Romano-British
remains the contrast alleged by this writer 'between an exotic culture
of a higher order and a vernacular culture of a primitive kind'. There
were in Britain splendid houses and poor ones. But a continuous
gradation of all sorts of houses and all degrees of comfort connects
them, and there is no discernible breach in the scale. Throughout, the
dominant element is the Roman provincial fashion which is borrowed from
Italy.
[Footnote 1: R.C. Hoare, _Ancient Wilts, Roman Aera_, p. 127: 'On some
of the highest of our downs I have found stuccoed and painted walls, as
well as hypocausts, introduced into the rude settlements of the
Britons.' This is fully borne out by General Pitt-Rivers' discoveries
near Rushmore, to be mentioned below. Similar rude hypocausts were
opened some years ago in my presence at Eastbourne.]
[Footnote 2: Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, p. 39.]
We find Roman influence even in the most secluded villages of the upland
region. At Din Lligwy, on the northeast coast of Anglesea, recent
excavation (Fig. 12) has uncovered the ruins of a village enclosure
about three-quarters of an acre in extent, containing round and square
huts or rooms, with walls of roughly coursed masonry and roofs of tile.
Scattered up and down in it lay hundreds of fragments of Samian and
other Roman or Romano-British pottery and a far smaller quantity of
ruder pieces, a few bits of Roman glass, some Roman coins of the period
A.D. 250-350, various iron nails and hooks, querns, bones, and so
forth.[1] The place lies on the extreme edge of the British province
and on an island where no proper Roman occupation can be detected, while
its ground-plan shows little sign of a Roman influence. Yet the smaller
objects and perhaps also the squareness of one or two rooms show that
even here, in the later days of the Empire, the products of Roman
civilization and the external fabric of Roman provincial life were
present and almost predominant.
[Footnote 1: E. Neil Baynes, _Arch. Cambrensis_, 1908, pp. 183-210.]
[Illustration: FIG. 12. NATIVE VILLAGE AT DIN LLIGWY, ANGLESEA.]
[Illustration: FIG. 13. LATE CELTIC METAL WORK, NOW IN THE BRITISH
MUSEUM (1/3).
(_Boss of shield, of perhaps first century B.C., found in the Thames at
Wandsworth, a little before 1850._)]
CHAPTER V
ROMANIZATION IN ART
Art shows a rather different picture. Here we reach definite survivals
of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before the Claudian
conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal and enamel, and
characterized by its love for spiral devices and its fantastic use of
animal forms. This art--La Tène or Late Celtic or whatever it be
styled--was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the
Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly clear in Britain. When
the Romans spread their dominion over the island, it almost wholly
vanished. For that we are not to blame any evil influence of this
particular Empire. All native arts, however beautiful, tend to disappear
before the more even technique and the neater finish of town
manufactures. The process is merely part of the honour which a coherent
civilization enjoys in the eyes of country folk. Disraeli somewhere
describes a Syrian lady preferring the French polish of a western boot
to the jewels of an eastern slipper. With a similar preference the
British Celt abandoned his national art and adopted the Roman provincial
fashion.
He did not abandon it entirely. Little local manufactures of pottery or
fibulae testify to its sporadic survival. Such are the brooches with
Celtic affinities made (as it seems) near Brough (Verterae) in
Westmorland, and the New Forest urns with their curious leaf ornament
(Fig. 14),[1] and above all the Castor ware from the banks of the Nen,
five miles west of Peterborough. We may briefly examine this last
instance.[2] At Castor and Chesterton, on the north and south sides of
the river, were two Romano-British settlements of comfortable houses,
furnished in genuine Roman style. Round them were extensive pottery
works. The ware, or at least the most characteristic of the wares, made
in these works is generally known as Castor or Durobrivian ware. Castor
was not, indeed, its only place of manufacture. It was produced freely
in northern Gaul, and possibly elsewhere in Britain.[3] But Castor is
the best known and best attested manufacturing centre, and the easiest
for us to examine. The ware directly embodies the Celtic tradition.
It is based, indeed, on classical elements, foliated scrolls,
hunting scenes, and occasionally mythological representations (Figs. 15,
16). But it recasts these elements with the vigour of a true art and in
accordance with its special tendencies. Those fantastic animals with
strange out-stretched legs and backturned heads and eager eyes; those
tiny scrolls scattered by way of decoration above or below them; the
rude beading which serves, not ineffectively, for ornament or for
dividing line; the suggestion of returning spirals; the evident delight
of the artist in plant and animal forms and his neglect of the human
figure--all these are Celtic. When we turn to the rarer scenes in which
man is specially prominent--a hunt, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione
fettered naked to a rock and Hercules saving her from the
monster[4]--the vigour fails (Fig. 17). The artist could not or would
not cope with the human form. His nude figures, Hesione and Hercules,
and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. They retain
traces of Celtic treatment, as in Hesione's hair. But the general
treatment is Roman. The Late Celtic art is here sinking into the general
conventionalism of the Roman provinces.
[Footnote 1: For the New Forest ware see the _Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire_, i. 326, and _Archaeol. Journal_, xxx. 319. The Brough
brooches have been pointed out by Sir A.J. Evans, whose work on Late
Celtic Art is the foundation of all that has since been written on it,
but have not been discussed in detail.]
[Footnote 2: _Victoria Hist. of Northamptonshire_, i. 206-13; Artis,
_Durobrivae of Antoninus_ (fol. 1828).]
[Footnote 3: For the Belgic 'Castor ware' see the Belgian _Bulletin des
commissions royales d'art et d'archéologie_ (passim); H. du Cleuziou,
_Poterie gauloise_ (Paris, 1872), Fig. 173, from Cologne; _Sammlung
Niessen_ (Köln, 1911), plates lxxxvii, lxxxviii; Brongniart, _Traité des
arts céram._, pl. xxix (Ghent and Rheinzabern). M. Salomon Reinach tells
me that the ware is not infrequent in the departments of the valleys of
the Seine, Marne, and Oise. The Colchester gladiator's urn mentioning
the Thirtieth Legion (C.R. Smith, _Coll. Ant._, iv. 82, C. vii. 1335, 3)
may well be of Rhenish manufacture.]
[Footnote 4: This, or the corresponding scene of Perseus and Andromeda,
is a favourite with artists in northern Gaul and Britain. It occurs on
tombstones at Chester (_Grosvenor Museum Catalogue_, No. 138) and Trier
(Hettner, _Die röm. Steindenkmäler zu Trier_, p. 206), and Arlon
(Wiltheim, _Luciliburgensia_, plate 57), and the Igel monument. For
other instances see Roscher's _Lexikon Mythol._, under 'Hesione'.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14. FRAGMENTS OF NEW FOREST POTTERY WITH LEAF
PATTERNS. (_From Archaeologia_).]
[Illustration: Fig. 15. URNS FROM CASTOR, NOW IN PETERBOROUGH MUSEUM.
(P. 41)]
[Illustration: FIG. 16. HUNTING SCENES FROM CASTOR WARE (ARTIS,
DUROBRIVAE). (SEE PAGE 41.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 17. HERCULES RESCUING HESIONE. (_From a piece of
Castor ware found in Northamptonshire._ C.R. Smith, _Coll. Ant._, vol.
iv, Pl. XXIV.)]
A second instance may be cited, this time from sculpture, of important
British work which is Celtic, or at least un-Roman (Frontispiece). The
Spa at Bath (Aquae Sulis) contained a stately temple to Sul or Sulis
Minerva, goddess of the waters. The pediment of this temple, partly
preserved by a lucky accident and unearthed in 1790, was carved with a
trophy of arms--in the centre a round wreathed shield upheld by two
Victories, and below and on either side a helmet, a standard (?), and a
cuirass. It is a classical group, such as occurs on other Roman reliefs.
But its treatment breaks clean away from the classical. The sculptor
placed on the shield a Gorgon's head, as suits alike Minerva and a
shield. But he gave to the Gorgon a beard and moustache, almost in the
manner of a head of Fear, and he wrought its features with a fierce
virile vigour that finds no kin in Greek or Roman art. I need not here
discuss the reasons which may have led him to add the male attributes to
a properly female type. For our present purpose the important fact is
that he could do it. Here is proof that, once at least, the supremacy of
the dominant conventional art of the Empire could be rudely broken
down.[1]
[Footnote 1: For the details of the temple and pediment see _Vict. Hist.
Somerset_, i. 229 foll., and references given there. I have discussed the
artistic problem on pp. 235 and 236.]
A third example, also from sculpture, is supplied by the Corbridge Lion,
found among the ruins of Corstopitum in Northumberland in 1907 (Fig.
18). It is a sculpture in the round showing nearly a life-sized lion
standing above his prey. The scene is common in provincial Roman work,
and not least in Gaul and Britain. Often it is connected with graves,
sometimes (as perhaps here) it served for the ornament of a fountain.
But if the scene is common, the execution of it is not. Artistically,
indeed, the piece is open to criticism. The lion is not the ordinary
beast of nature. His face, the pose of his feet, the curl of his tail
round his hind leg, are all untrue to life. The man who carved him knew
perhaps more of dogs than lions. But he fashioned a living animal.
Fantastic and even grotesque as it is, his work possesses a wholly
unclassical fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked
when seeing it that it recalls not the Roman world but the Middle
Ages.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Arch. Aeliana_, 1908, p. 205. I owe to Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell a criticism on the truthfulness of the sculpture.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18. THE CORBRIDGE LION. (P. 43.)]
These exceptions to the ruling Roman-provincial culture are probably
commoner in Britain than in the Celtic lands across the Channel. In
northern Gaul we meet no such vigorous semi-barbaric carving as the
Gorgon and the Lion. At Trier or Metz or Arlon or Sens the sculptures
are consistently classical in style and feeling, and the value of this
fact is none the less if (with some writers) we find special
geographical reasons for the occurrence of certain of these
sculptures.[1] Smaller objects tell much the same tale. In particular
the bronze 'fibulae' of Roman Britain are peculiarly British. Their
commonest varieties are derived from Celtic prototypes and hardly occur
abroad. The most striking example of this is supplied by the enamelled
'dragon-brooches'. Both their design (Fig. 19) and their gorgeous
colouring are Celtic in spirit; they occur not seldom in Britain; on the
Continent only four instances have been recorded.[2] Here certainly
Roman Britain is more Celtic than Gallia Belgica or the Rhine Valley.
Yet a complete survey of the brooches used in Roman Britain would show a
large number of types which were equally common in Britain and on the
Continent. Exceptions are always more interesting than rules--even in
grammar. But the exceptions pass and the rules remain. The Castor ware
and the Gorgon's head are exceptions. The rule stands that the material
civilization of Britain was Roman. Except the Gorgon, every worked or
sculptured stone at Bath follows the classical conventions. Except the
Castor and New Forest pottery, all the better earthenware in use in
Britain obeys the same law. The kind that was most generally employed for
all but the meaner purposes, was not Castor but Samian or _terra
sigillata_.[3] This ware is singularly characteristic of
Roman-provincial art. As I have said above, it is copied wholesale from
Italian originals. It is purely imitative and conventional; it reveals
none of that delight in ornament, that spontaneousness in devising
decoration and in working out artistic patterns which can clearly be
traced in Late Celtic work. It is simply classical, in an inferior
degree.
[Footnote 1: Michaelis, Loeschke and others assume an early intercourse
between the Mosel basin and eastern Europe, and thereby explain both a
statue in Pergamene style which was found at Metz and appears to have
been carved there and also the Neumagen sculptures. As all these pieces
were pretty certainly produced in Roman times, the early intercourse
seems an inadequate cause. Moreover, Pergamene work, while rare in
Italy, occurs in Aquitania and Africa, and may have been popular in the
provinces.]
[Footnote 2: I have given a list in _Archaeologia Aeliana_, 1909, p.
420, to which four English and one foreign example have now to be added.
See also Curle, _Newstead_, p. 319, and R.A. Smith, _Proc. Soc. Ant.
Lond._, xxii. 61.]
[Footnote 3: I may record here a protest against the attempts made from
time to time to dispossess the term 'Samian'. Nothing better has been
suggested in its stead, and the word itself has the merit of perfect
lucidity. Of the various substitutes suggested, 'Pseudo-Arretine' is
clumsy, 'Terra Sigillata' is at least as incorrect, and 'Gaulish' covers
only a part of the field (_Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond._, xxiii. 120).]
[Illustration: FIG. 19. 'DRAGON-BROOCHES' FOUND AT CORBRIDGE (1/1). (P.
44.)]
The contrast between this Romano-British civilization and the native
culture which preceded it can readily be seen if we compare for a moment
a Celtic village and a Romano-British village. Examples of each have
been excavated in the south-west of England, hardly thirty miles apart.
The Celtic village is close to Glastonbury in Somerset. Of itself it is
a small, poor place--just a group of pile dwellings rising out of a
marsh, or (as it may then have been) a lake, and dating from the two
centuries immediately preceding the Christian era.[1] Yet, poor as it
was, its art is distinct. There one recognizes all that general delight
in decoration and that genuine artistic instinct which mark Late Celtic
work, while the technical details of the ornament, as, for example, the
returning spiral, reveal their affinity with the same native fashion. On
the other hand, no trace of classical workmanship or design intrudes.
There has not been found anywhere in the village even a _fibula_ with a
hinge instead of a spring, or of an Italian (as opposed to a Late
Celtic) pattern. Turn now to the Romano-British villages excavated by
General Pitt-Rivers at Woodcuts and Rotherley and Woodyates, eleven
miles south-west of Salisbury, near the Roman road from Old Sarum
(Sorbiodunum) to Dorchester in Dorset.[2] Here you may search in vain
for vestiges of the native art or of that delight in artistic ornament
which characterizes it. Everywhere the monotonous Roman culture meets
the eye. To pass from Glastonbury to Woodcuts is like passing from some
old timbered village of Kent or Sussex to the uniform streets of a
modern city suburb. Life at Woodcuts had, no doubt, its barbaric side.
One writer who has discussed its character with a view to the present
problem[3] comments, with evident distaste, on 'dwellings connected with
pits used as storage rooms, refuse sinks, and burial places' and
'corpses crouching in un-Roman positions'. The first feature is not
without its parallels in modern countries and it was doubtless common in
ancient Italy. The second would be more significant if such skeletons
occupied all or even the majority of the graves in these villages.
Neither feature really mars the broad result, that the material life was
Roman. Perhaps the villagers knew little enough of the Roman
civilization in its higher aspects. Perhaps they did not speak Latin
fluently or habitually. They may well have counted among the less
Romanized of the southern Britons. Yet round them too hung the heavy
inevitable atmosphere of the Roman material civilization.
[Footnote 1: The Glastonbury village was excavated in and after 1892 at
intervals; a full account of the finds is now being issued by Bulleid
and Gray (_The Glastonbury Lake Village_, vol. i, 1911), with a preface
by Dr. R. Munro. The finds themselves are mostly at Glastonbury.]
[Footnote 2: Described in four quarto volumes, _Excavations in Cranborne
Chase, &c._, issued privately by the late General Pitt-Rivers, 1887-98.]
[Footnote 3: Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, p. 39. A parallel to
the non-Roman burials found by General Pitt-Rivers may be found in the
will of a Lingonian Gaul who died probably in the latter part of the
first century. Apparently he was a Roman citizen, and his will is drawn
in strict Roman fashion. But its last clause orders the burning of all
his hunting apparatus, spears and nets, &c., on his funeral pyre, and
thus betrays the Gaulish habit (Bruns, p. 308, ed. 1909).]
The facts which I have tried to set forth in the preceding paragraphs
seem to me to possess more weight than is always allowed. Some writers,
for instance M. Loth, speak as if the external environment of daily
life, the furniture and decorations and architecture of our houses, or
the clothes and buckles and brooches of our dress, bore no relation to
the feelings and sentiments of those that used them. That is not a
tenable proposition. The external fabric of life is not a negligible
quantity but a real factor. On the one hand, it is hardly credible that
an unromanized folk should adopt so much of Roman things as the British
did, and yet remain uninfluenced. And it is equally incredible that,
while it remained unromanized, it should either care or understand how
to borrow all the externals of Roman life. The truth of this was clear
to Tacitus in the days when the Romanization of Britain was proceeding.
It may be recognized in the east or in Africa to-day. Even among the
civilized nations of the present age the recent growth of stronger
national feelings has been accompanied by a preference for home-products
and home-manufactures and a distaste for foreign surroundings.
CHAPTER VI
ROMANIZATION IN THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-SYSTEM
I have dealt with the language and the material civilization of the
province of Britain. I pass to a third and harder question, the
administrative and legal framework of local Romano-British life. Here we
have to discuss the extent to which the Roman town-system of the
_colonia_ and _municipium_, and the Roman land-system of the _villa_
penetrated Britain. And, first, as to the towns. Britain, we know,
contained five municipalities of the privileged Italian type. The
_colonia_ of Camulodunum (Colchester) and the _municipium_ of Verulamium
(St. Albans), both in the south-east of the island, were established
soon after the Claudian conquest. The _colonia_ of Lindum (Lincoln) was
probably founded in the early Flavian period (A.D. 70-80), when the
Ninth Legion, hitherto at Lincoln, was probably pushed forward to York.
The _colonia_ at Glevum (Gloucester) arose in A.D. 96-98, as an
inscription seems definitely to attest. Lastly, the _colonia_ at
Eburacum (York) must have grown up during the second or the early third
century, under the ramparts of the legionary fortress, though separated
from it by the intervening river Ouse.[1] Each of these five towns had,
doubtless, its dependent _ager attributus_, which may have been as large
as an average English county, and each provided the local government
for its territory.[2] That implies a definitely Roman form of local
government for a considerable area--a larger area, certainly, than
received such organization in northern Gaul. Yet it accounts, on the
most liberal estimate, for barely one-eighth of the civilized part of
the province.
[Footnote 1: The fortress was situated on the left or east bank of the
Ouse close to the present cathedral, which stands wholly within its
area. Parts of the Roman walls can still be traced, especially at the
so-called Multangular Tower. The municipality lay on the other (west)
bank of the Ouse, near the railway station, where various mosaics
indicate dwelling-houses. Its outline and plan are, however, not known.
Even its situation has not been generally recognized.]
[Footnote 2: If the evidence of milestones may be pressed, the
'territory' of Eburacum extended southwards at least twenty miles to
Castleford, and that of Lincoln at least fourteen miles to Littleborough
(_Ephemeris Epigraphica_, vii. 1105=ix. 1253, where the last two lines
are AVGG EB|MP XX (or XXII), and vii. 1097). The general size of these
municipal 'territoria' is amply proved by Continental inscriptions.]
Of the rest, some part may have been included in the Imperial Domains,
which covered wide tracts in every province and were administered for
local purposes by special procurators of the Emperor. The lead-mining
districts--Mendip in Somerset, the neighbourhood of Matlock in
Derbyshire, the Shelve Hills west of Wroxeter, the Halkyn region in
Flintshire, the moors of south-west Yorkshire--must have belonged to
these Domains, and for the most part are actually attested by
inscriptions on lead-pigs as Imperial property. Of other domain lands we
meet one early instance at Silchester in the reign of Nero[1]--perhaps
the confiscated estates of some British prince or noble--and though we
have no further direct evidence, the analogy of other provinces suggests
that the area increased as the years went by. Yet it is likely that in
Britain, as indeed in Gaul,[2] the domain lands were comparatively small
in amount. Like the municipalities, they account only for a part of the
province.
[Footnote 1: Tile inscribed NERCLCAEAVGGER, _Nero Claudius Caesar
Augustus Germanicus_ (_Eph._ ix. 1267). It differs markedly from the
ordinary tiles found at Silchester, and plainly belongs to a different
period in the history of the site. Possibly the estate, or whatever it
was, did not remain Imperial after Nero's downfall; compare Plutarch,
_Galba_, 5. The Combe Down _Principia_ (C. vii. 62), which are certainly
not military, may supply another example, of about A.D. 210 (_Vict.
Hist. Somerset_, i. 311; _Eph._ ix. p. 516).]
[Footnote 2: Hirschfeld in Lehmann's _Beiträge zur alten Geschichte_,
ii. 307, 308. Much of the Gaulish domain land appears to date from
confiscations in A.D. 197.]
Throughout all the rest of the British province, or at least of its
civilized area, the local government was probably organized on the same
cantonal system as obtained in northern Gaul. According to this system
the local unit was the former territory of the tribe or canton, and the
local magistrates were the chiefs or nobles of the tribe. That may
appear at first sight to be a native system, wholly out of harmony with
the Roman method of government by municipalities. Yet such was not its
actual effect. The cantonal or tribal magistrates were classified and
arranged just like the magistrates of a municipality. They even used the
same titles. The cantonal _civitas_ had its _duoviri_ and quaestors and
so forth, and its _ordo_ or senate, precisely like any municipal
_colonia_ or _municipium_. So far from wearing a native aspect, this
cantonal system merely became one of the influences which aided the
Romanization of the country. It did not, indeed, involve, like the
municipal system, the substitution of an Italian for a native
institution. Instead, it permitted the complete remodelling of the
native institution by the interpenetration of Italian influences.
We can discern the cantonal system at several points in Britain. But the
British cantons were smaller and less wealthy than those of Gaul, and
therefore they have not left their mark, either in monuments or in
nomenclature, so clearly as we might desire. Many inscriptions record
the working of the system in Gaul. Many modern towns--Paris, Reims,
Chartres, and thirty or forty others--derive their present names from
those of the ancient cantons, and not from those of the ancient towns.
In Britain we find only one such inscription (Fig. 15),[1] only one town
called in antiquity by a tribal name--and that a doubtful
instance[2]--and no single case of a modern town-name which is derived
from the name of a tribe.[3] We have, however, some curious evidence
from another source. There is a late and obscure _Geography of the Roman
Empire_ which was probably written at Ravenna somewhere about A.D. 700,
and which, as its author's name is lost, is generally quoted as the work
of 'Ravennas'. It consists for the most part of mere lists of names,
about which it adds very few details. But in the case of Britain it
notes the municipal rank of the various _coloniae_, and it further
appends tribal names to nine or ten town-names, which are thus
distinguished from all other British place-names. For example, we have
Venta Belgarum (Winchester), not Venta simply; Corinium Dobunorum
(Cirencester), not Corinium simply. The towns thus specially marked out
are just those towns which are also declared by their actual remains to
have been the chief country towns of Roman Britain. This coincidence can
hardly be an accident. We may infer that the towns to which the Ravennas
appends tribal names were the cantonal capitals of the districts of
Roman Britain, and that a list of them, perhaps mutilated and imperfect,
has been preserved by some chance in this late writer. In other words,
the larger part of Roman Britain was divided up into districts
corresponding to the territories of the Celtic tribes; each had its
capital, and presumably its magistrates and senate, as the
above-mentioned inscription shows that the Silures had at Venta Silurum.
We may suppose, indeed, that the district magistrates--the county
council, as it would now be called--were also the magistrates of the
country town. The same cantonal system, then, existed here as in
northern Gaul. Only, it was weaker in Britain. It could not impose
tribal names on the towns, and it went down easily when the Empire fell.
In Gaul, Lutetia Parisiorum became Parisiis and is now Paris, and
Nemetacum Atrebatum became Atrebatis and is now Arras. In Britain,
Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) remained Calleva, so far as we know, till
it perished altogether in the fifth century.[4]
[Footnote 1: Found at Venta Silurum (Caerwent) in 1903: ... _leg.
legi[i] Aug. proconsul(i) provinc. Narbonensis, leg. Aug. pr. pr. provi.
Lugudunen(sis): ex decreto ordinis respubl(ica) civit(atis) Silurum_--a
monument erected by the cantonal senate of the Silures to some general
of the Second legion at Isca Silurum, twelve miles from
Caerwent--perhaps to Claudius Paulinus, early in third century
(_Athenaeum_, Sept. 26, 1903; _Archaeologia_, lix. 120; _Eph._ ix.
1012). Other inscriptions mention a _civis Cantius_, a _civitas
Catuvellaunorum_ and the like, but their evidence is less distinct.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20. INSCRIPTION FOUND AT CAERWENT (VENTA SILURUM)
MENTIONING A DECREE OF THE SENATE OF THE CANTON OF SILURES.]
[Footnote 2: _Icinos_ in _Itin. Ant._ 474. 6 may well be Venta Icenorum
(_Victoria Hist. of Norfolk_, i. 286, 300).]
[Footnote 3: Canterbury may seem an exception. But its name comes
ultimately from the Early English form of Cantium, not from the Cantii.
In the south-west and in Wales, tribal names like Dumnonii (Devonshire),
Demetae, Ordovices, have lingered on in one form or another, and,
according to Professor Rhys, Bernicia is derivable from Brigantes. But
these cases differ widely from the Gaulish instances.]
[Footnote 4: Ravennas (ed. Parthey and Pinder), pp. 425 foll. I have
given a list of the towns in my Appendix to Mommsen's _Provinces of the
Empire_ (English trans., 1909), ii. 352.]
Of the smaller local organizations, little can be said. Towns existed,
but many of them were the tribal capitals mentioned in the last
paragraph, and these, as I have said, were doubtless ruled by the
magistrates of the tribes. It is idle to guess who administered the
towns that were not such capitals or who controlled the various villages
scattered through the country. Nor can we pretend to know much more
about the size and character of the estates which corresponded to the
country-houses and farms of which remains survive. The 'villa' system of
demesne farms and serfs or _coloni_[1] which obtained elsewhere was
doubtless familiar in Britain; indeed, the Theodosian Code definitely
refers to British _coloni_.[2] But whether it was the only rural system
in Britain is beyond proof, and previous attempts to work out the
problem have done little more than demonstrate the fact.[3] It is quite
possible that here, or indeed in any province, other forms of estates
and of land tenure may have existed beside the predominant villa.[4]
The one thing needed is evidence. And in any case the net result appears
fairly certain. The bulk of British local government must have been
carried on through Roman municipalities, through imperial estates, and
still more through tribal _civitates_ using a Romanized constitution.
The bulk of the landed estates must have conformed in their legal
aspects to the 'villas' of other provinces. Whatever room there may be
for survival of native customs or institutions, we have no evidence that
they survived, within the Romanized area, either in great amount or in
any form which contrasted with the general Roman character of the
country.
[Footnote 1: The term 'villa' is generally used to denote Romano-British
country-houses and farms, irrespective of their legal classification.
The use is so firmly established, both in England and abroad, that it
would be idle to attempt to alter it. But for clearness I have thought
it better in this paper to employ the term 'villa' only where I refer to
the definite 'villa' system.]
[Footnote 2: Cod. Theod. xi. 7.2.]
[Footnote 3: For instance, Mr. Seebohm (_English Village Community_, pp.
254 foll.) connects the suffix 'ham' with the Roman 'villa' and
apparently argues that the occurrence of the suffix indicates in general
the former existence of a 'villa'. But his map showing the percentage of
local names ending in 'ham' in various counties disproves his view
completely. For the distribution of the suffix 'ham' and the frequency
of Roman country-houses and farms do not coincide. In Norfolk, for
instance, 'ham' is common, but there is hardly a trace of a Roman
country-house or farm in the whole county (_Victoria Hist. of Norfolk_,
i. 294-8). Somerset, on the other hand, is crowded with Roman
country-houses, and has hardly any 'hams'.]
[Footnote 4: Professor Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_ (chap. ii),
argues strongly for the existence of Celtic land-tenures besides the
Roman 'villa' system. 'There was room (he suggests) for all sorts of
conditions, from almost exact copies of Roman municipal corporations and
Italian country-houses to tribal arrangements scarcely coloured by a
thin sprinkling of imperial administration' (p. 83). As will be seen,
this is not improbable. But I can find no definite proof of it. If
northern Gaul were better known to us, it might provide a decisive
analogy. But the Gaulish evidence itself seems at present disputable.]
CHAPTER VII
CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION
From this consideration of the evidence available to illustrate the
Romanization of Britain, I pass to the inquiry how far history helps us
to trace out the chronology of the process. A few facts and
probabilities emerge as guides. Intercourse between south-eastern
Britain and the Roman world had already begun before the Roman conquest
in A.D. 43. Latin words, as I have said above (p. 24), had begun to
appear on the native British coinage, and Arretine pottery had found its
way to such places as Foxton in Cambridgeshire, Alchester in
Oxfordshire, and Southwark in Surrey.[1] The establishment of a
_municipium_ at Verulamium (St. Albans) sometime before A.D. 60, and
probably even before A.D. 50,[2] points the same way. The peculiar
status of _municipium_ was granted in the early Empire especially to
native provincial towns which had become Romanized without official
Roman action or settlement of Roman soldiers or citizens, and which had,
as it were, merited municipal privileges. It is quite likely that such
Romanization had begun at Verulam before the Roman conquest, and formed
the justification for the early grant of such privileges. Certainly the
whole lowland area, as far west as Exeter and Shrewsbury, and as far
north as the Humber, was conquered before Claudius died, and
Romanization may have commenced in it at once.
[Footnote 1: Babington, _Anc. Cambridgeshire_, p. 64; E. Krüger, _Westd.
Korr.-Blatt_, 1904, p. 181; my note, _Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond._, xxi. 461
_Journal of Roman Studies_, i. 146. Mr. H.B. Walters has dealt with the
Southwark piece in the _Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiq. Society_,
xii. 107, but with some errors. The Alchester piece may be later than
A.D. 43.]
[Footnote 2: The grant is very much more likely to have been made by
Claudius than by Nero, and more likely to belong to the earlier than to
the later years of Claudius.]
Thirty years later Agricola, who was obviously a better administrator
than a general, openly encouraged the process. According to Tacitus, his
efforts met with great success; Latin began to be spoken, the toga to be
worn, temples, town halls, and private houses to be built in Roman
fashion.[1] Agricola appears to have been merely carrying out the policy
of his age. Certainly it is just at this period (about 75-85 A.D.) that
towns like Silchester, Bath, Caerwent, seem to take definite shape,[2]
and civil judges (_legati iuridici_) were appointed, presumably to
administer the justice more frequently required by the advancing
civilization.[3] In A.D. 85 it was thought safe to reduce the garrison
by a legion and some auxiliaries.[4] Progress, however, was not
maintained. About 115-20, and again about 155-63 and 175-80, the
northern part of the province was vexed by serious risings, and the
civilian area was doubtless kept somewhat in disturbance.[5] Probably it
was at some point in this period that the flourishing country town of
Isurium (Aldborough), fifteen miles from York, had to shield itself by a
stone wall and ditch.[6]
[Footnote 1: Tac. _Agr._ 21, quoted in note 3 to p. 13.]
[Footnote 2: Silchester was plainly laid out in Roman fashion all at
once on a definite street plan, and though some few of its houses may be
older, the town as a whole seems to have taken its rise from this event.
The evidence of coins implies that the development of the place began in
the Flavian period (_Athenaeum_, Dec. 15, 1904). At Bath the earliest
datable stones belong to the same time (_Victoria Hist. of Somerset_,
vol. i, Roman Bath), the first being a fragmentary inscription of A.D.
76. At Caerwent the evidence is confined to coins and fibulae, none of
which seem earlier than Vespasian or Domitian: for the coins see
_Clifton Antiq. Club's Proceedings_, v. 170-82.]
[Footnote 3: A. von Domaszewski, _Rhein. Mus._, xlvi. 599; C. ix. 5533
(as completed by Domaszewski), inscription of Salvius Liberalis; C. iii.
2864=9960, inscription of Iavolenus Priscus. Both these belong to the
Flavian period. Other instances are known from the second century.]
[Footnote 4: _Classical Review_, xviii. (1904) 458; xix. (1905) 58,
withdrawal of Batavian cohorts. The withdrawal of _Legio ii Adiutrix_ is
well known.]
[Footnote 5: See my papers in _Archaeologia Aeliana_, xxv. (1904) 142-7,
and _Proceedings of Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland_, xxxviii. 454.]
[Footnote 6: The town wall of Isurium, partly visible to-day in Mr. A.S.
Lawson's garden, is constructed in a fashion which suggests rather the
second century than the later date when most of the town walls in
Britain and Gaul were probably built, the end of the third or even the
fourth century. Thus, its stones show the 'diamond broaching' which
occurs on the Vallum of Pius, and which must therefore have been in use
during the second century.]
Peace hardly set in till the opening of the third century. It was then,
I think, that country-houses and farms first became common in all parts
of the civilized area. The statistics of datable objects discovered in
these buildings seem conclusive on this point. Except in Kent and the
south-eastern region generally, not only coins, but also pottery of the
first century are infrequent, and many sites have yielded nothing
earlier than about A.D. 250. Despite the ill name that attaches to the
third and fourth centuries, they were perhaps for Britain, as for parts
of Gaul,[1] a period of progressive prosperity. Certainly, the number of
British country-houses and farms inhabited during the years A.D. 280-350
must have been very large. Prosperity culminated, perhaps, in the
Constantinian Age. Then, as Eumenius tells us, skilled artisans abounded
in Britain far more than in Gaul, and were fetched from the island to
build public and private edifices as far south as Autun.[2] Then also,
and, indeed, as late as 360, British corn was largely exported to the
Rhine Valley,[3] and British cloth earned a notice in the eastern Edict
of Diocletian.[4] The province at that time was a prosperous and
civilized region, where Latin speech and culture might be expected to
prevail widely.
[Footnote 1: Mommsen, _Röm. Gesch._, v. 97, 106, and Ausonius,
_passim_.]
[Footnote 2: Eumenius, _Paneg. Constantio Caesari_, 21 _civitas Aeduorum
... plurimos quibus illae provinciae_ (Britain) _redundabant accepit
artifices, et nunc exstructione veterum domorum et refectione operum
publicorum et templorum instauratione consurgit_.]
[Footnote 3: Ammianus, xviii. 2,3, _annona a Brittaniis sueta
transferri_; Zosimus, iii. 5.]
[Footnote 4: Edict. Diocl. xix. 36. Compare Eumenius, _Paneg.
Constantino Aug.,_ 9 _pecorum innumerabilis multitudo ... onusta
velleribus_, and _Constantio Caesari_, 11 _tanto laeta munere
pastionum_. Traces of dyeing works have been discovered at Silchester
(_Archaeologia_, liv. 460, &c.) and of fulling in rural dwellings at
Chedworth in Gloucestershire, Darenth in Kent, and Titsey in Surrey
(Fox, _Archaeologia_, lix. 207).]
No golden age lasts long. Before 350, probably in 343, Constans had to
cross the Channel and repel the Picts and other assailants.[1] After 368
such aid was more often and more urgently required. Significantly
enough, the lists of coins found in some country-houses close about
350-60, while others remained occupied till about 385 or even later. The
rural districts, it is plain, began then to be no longer safe; some
houses were burnt by marauding bands, and some abandoned by their
owners.[2] Therewith came necessarily, as in many other provinces, a
decline of Roman influences and a rise of barbarism. Men took the lead
who were not polished and civilized Romans of Italy or of the provinces,
but warriors and captains of warrior bands. The Menapian Carausius,
whatever his birthplace,[3] was the forerunner of a numerous class.
Finally, the great raid of 406-7 and its sequel severed Britain from
Rome. A wedge of barbarism was driven in between the two, and the
central government, itself in bitter need, ceased to send officers to
rule the province and to command its troops. Britain was left to itself.
Yet even now it did not seek separation from Rome. All that we know
supports the view of Mommsen. It was not Britain which broke loose from
the Empire, but the Empire which gave up Britain.[4]
[Footnote 1: Ammianus, xx. 1. The expedition was important enough to be
recorded--unless I am mistaken--on coins such as those which show
victorious Constans on a galley, recrossing the Channel after his
success (Cohen, 9-13, &c.). On the history of the whole period for
Britain see _Cambridge Medieval History_, i. 378, 379.]
[Footnote 2: See, for example, the coin-finds of the country-houses at
Thruxton, Abbots Ann, Clanville, Holbury, Carisbrooke, &c., in Hampshire
(_Victoria Hist. of Hants_, i. 294 foll.). The Croydon hoard deposited
about A.D. 351 (_Numismatic Chronicle_, 1905, p. 37) may be assigned to
the same cause.]
[Footnote 3: It is hard to believe him an Irishman, though Professor
Rhys supports the idea (_Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc., Kerry Meeting_,
1891). The one ancient authority, Aurelius Victor (xxxix. 20), describes
him simply as _Menapiae civis_. The Gaulish Menapii were well known; the
Irish Menapii were very obscure, and the brief reference can only refer
to the former.]
[Footnote 4: Mommsen, _Röm. Gesch_., v. 177. Zosimus, vi. 5 (A.D. 408),
in a puzzling passage describes Britain as revolting from Rome when
Constantine was tyrant (A.D. 407-11). It is generally assumed that when
Constantine failed to protect these regions, they set up for themselves,
and in that troubled time such a step would be natural enough. But
Zosimus, a little later on (vi. 10, A.D. 410), casually states that
Honorius wrote to Britain, bidding the provincials defend themselves, so
that the act of 408 cannot have been final--unless, indeed, as the
context of Zosimus suggests and as Gothofredus and others have thought,
the name 'Britain' is here a copyist's mistake for 'Bruttii' or some
other Italian name. In any case the 'groans of the Britons' recorded by
Gildas show that the island looked to Rome long after 410. On
Constantine see Freeman, _Western Europe in the Fifth Century_, pp. 48,
148 and Bury, _Life of St. Patrick_, p. 329.]
Such is, in brief, the positive evidence, archaeological, linguistic,
and historical, which illustrates the Romanization of Britain. The
conclusions which it allows seem to be two. First, and mainly: the
Empire did its work in our island as it did generally on the western
continent. It Romanized the province, introducing Roman speech and
thought and culture. Secondly, this Romanization was perhaps not uniform
throughout all sections of the population. Within the lowlands the
result was on the whole achieved. In the towns and among the upper class
in the country Romanization was substantially complete--as complete as
in northern Gaul, and possibly indeed even more complete. But both the
lack of definite evidence and the probabilities of the case require us
to admit that the peasantry may have been less thoroughly Romanized. It
was covered with a superimposed layer of Roman civilization. But beneath
this layer the native element may have remained potentially, if not
actually, Celtic, and in the remoter districts the native speech may
have lingered on, like Erse or Manx to-day, as a rival to the more
fashionable Latin. How far this happened actually within the civilized
lowland area we cannot tell. But we may be sure that the military
region, Wales and the north, never became thoroughly Romanized, and
Cornwall and western Devon also lie beyond the pale (p. 21). Here the
Britons must have remained Celtic, or at least capable of a reversion to
the Celtic tradition. Here, at any rate, a Celtic revival was possible.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE
So far we have considered the province of Britain as it was while it
still remained in real fact a province. Let us now turn to the sequel
and ask how it fits in with its antecedents. The Romanization, we find,
held its own for a while. The sense of belonging to the Empire had not
quite died out even in sixth-century Britain. Roman names continued to
be used, not exclusively but freely enough, by Britons. Roman 'culture
words' seem to occur in the later British language, and some at least of
these may be traceable to the Roman occupation of the island. Roman
military terms appear, if scantily. Roman inscriptions are occasionally
set up. The Romanization of Britain was plainly no mere interlude, which
passed without leaving a mark behind.[1] But it was crossed by two
hostile forges, a Celtic revival and an English invasion.
[Footnote 1: Much of the ornamentation used by post-Roman Celtic art
comes from Roman sources, in particular the interlaced or plaitwork,
which has been well studied by Mr. Romilly Allen. But how far it was
borrowed from Romano-British originals and how far from similar
Roman-provincial work on the Continent, is not very clear. (See p. 36.)]
The Celtic revival was due to many influences. We may find one cause for
it in the Celtic environment of the province. After 407 the Romanized
area was cut off from Rome. Its nearest neighbours were now the
less-Romanized Britons of districts like Cornwall and the foreign Celts
of Ireland and the north. These were weighty influences in favour of a
Celtic revival. And they were all the more potent because, in or even
before the period under discussion, the opening of the fifth century, a
Celtic migration seems to have set in from the Irish coasts. The details
of this migration are unknown, and the few traces which survive of it
are faint and not altogether intelligible. The principal movement was
that of the Scotti from North Ireland into Caledonia, with the result
that, once settled there, or perhaps rather in the course of settling
there, they went on to pillage Roman Britain. There were also movements
in the south, but apparently on a smaller scale and a more peaceful
plan.[1] At a date given commonly as A.D. 265-70--though there does not
seem to be any very good reason for it--the Dessi or Déisi were expelled
from Meath and a part of them settled in the south-west of Wales, in the
land then called Demetia. This was a region which was both thinly
inhabited and imperfectly Romanized. In it fugitives from Ireland might
easily find room. The settlement may have been formed, as Professor Bury
suggests, with the consent of the Imperial Government and under
conditions of service. But we are entirely ignorant whether these exiles
from Ireland numbered tens or scores or hundreds, and this uncertainty
renders speculation dangerous. If the newcomers were few and their new
homes were in the remote west beyond Carmarthen (Maridunum), formal
consent would hardly have been required. Other Irish immigrants probably
followed. Their settlements were apparently confined to Cornwall and the
south-west coast of Wales, and their influence may easily be overrated.
Some, indeed, came as enemies, though perhaps rather as enemies to the
Roman than to the Celtic elements in the province. Such must have been
Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was killed--according to the traditional
chronology--about A.D. 405 on the British coast and perhaps in the
Channel itself.
[Footnote 1: Professor Rhys, _Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc. Kerry Meeting_,
1891, and _Celtic Britain_ (ed. 3, 1904, p. 247), is inclined to
minimize the invasions of southern Britain (Cornwall and Wales).
Professor Bury (_Life of St. Patrick_, p. 288) tends to emphasize them;
see also Zimmer, _Nennius Vindicatus_, pp. 84 foll., and Kuno Meyer,
_Cymmrodorion Transactions_, 1895-6, pp. 55 foll. The decision of the
question seems to depend upon whether we should regard the Goidelic
elements visible in western Britain as due in part to an original
Goidelic population or ascribe them wholly to Irish immigrants. At
present philologists do not seem able to speak with certainty on this
point. But the evidence for some amount of invasion seems adequate.]
All this must have contributed to the reintroduction of Celtic national
feeling and culture. A Celtic immigrant, it may be, was the man who set
up the Ogam pillar at Silchester (Fig. 21), which was discovered in the
excavations of 1893.[1] The circumstances of the discovery show that
this pillar belongs to the very latest period in the history of Calleva.
Its inscription is Goidelic: that is, it does not belong to the ordinary
Callevan population, which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best
explained as the work of some western Celt who reached Silchester before
its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We do not know the date of
that event, though we may conjecturally put it before, and perhaps a
good many years before, A.D. 500. In any case, an Ogam monument had been
set up before it occurred, and the presence of such an object would seem
to prove that Celtic things had made their way even into this eastern
Romanized town.
[Footnote 1: _Archaeologia_, liv. 233, 441; Rhys and Brynmor Jones,
_Welsh People_, pp. 45, 65; _Victoria Hist. of Hampshire_, i. 279;
_English Hist. Review_, xix. 628. Whether the man who wrote was Irish or
British depends on the answer to the question set forth in the preceding
note. Unfortunately, we do not know when the Ogam script came first into
use. Professor Rhys tells me that the Silchester example may quite
conceivably belong to the fifth century.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21. OGAM INSCRIPTION FROM SILCHESTER.]
But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found in another
fact--that is the destruction of the Romanized part of Britain by the
invading Saxons. War, and especially defensive war against invaders,
must always weaken the higher forms of any country's civilization. Here
the agony was long, and the assailants cruel and powerful, and the
country itself was somewhat weak. Its wealth was easily exhausted. Its
towns were small. Its fortresses were not impregnable. Its leaders were
divided and disloyal. Moreover, the assault fell on the very parts of
Britain which were the seats of Roman culture. Even in the early years
of the fourth century it had been found necessary to defend the coasts
of East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly populated
and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates by a series
of forts which extended from the Wash to Spithead, and were known as the
forts of the Saxon Shore. Fifty or seventy years later the raiders,
whether English seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland,
devastated the coasts of the province and perhaps reached even the
midlands.[1] When, seventy years later still, the English came, no
longer to plunder but to settle, they occupied first the Romanized area
of the island. As the Romano-Britons retired from the south and east, as
Silchester was evacuated in despair[2] and Bath and Wroxeter were
stormed and left desolate, the very centres of Romanized life were
extinguished. Not a single one remained an inhabited town. Destruction
fell even on Canterbury, where the legends tell of intercourse between
Briton or Saxon, and on London, where ecclesiastical writers fondly
place fifth- and sixth-century bishops. Both sites lay empty and
untenanted for many years. Only in the far west, at Exeter or at
Caerwent, does our evidence allow us to guess at a continuing
Romano-British life.
[Footnote 1: About A.D. 405 Patrick was carried off from Bannavem
Taberniae. If this represents the Romano-British village on Watling
Street called Bannaventa, near Daventry in Northants (_Victoria Hist._
i. 186), the raids must have covered all the midlands: see _Engl. Hist.
Review_, 1895, p. 711; Zimmer, _Realenc. für protestantische Theol._ x.
(1901), Art. 'Keltische Kirche'; Bury, _Life of St. Patrick_, p. 322.
There are, however, too many uncertainties surrounding this question to
let us derive much help from it.]
[Footnote 2: _Engl. Hist. Review_, xix. 625; Fox, _Victoria Hist. of
Hampshire_, i. 371-2.]
The same destruction came also on the population. During the long series
of disasters, many of the Romanized inhabitants of the lowland regions
must have perished. Many must have fallen into slavery, and may have
been sold into foreign lands. The remnant, such as it was, doubtless
retired to the west. But, in doing so, it exchanged the region of walled
cities and civilized houses, of city life and Roman culture, for a
Celtic land. No doubt it attempted to keep up its Roman fashions. The
writers may well be correct who speak of two conflicting parties, Roman
and Celtic, among the Britons of the sixth century. But the Celtic
element triumphed. Gildas, about A.D. 540, describes a Britain confined
to the west of our island, which is very largely Celtic and not
Roman.[1] Had the English invaded the island from the Atlantic, we might
have seen a different spectacle. The Celtic element would have perished
utterly: the Roman would have survived. As it was, the attack fell on
the east and south of the island--that is, on the lowlands of Britain.
Safe in its western hills, the Celtic revival had full course.
[Footnote 1: How much of Britain was still British when Gildas wrote, he
does not tell us. But he mentions only the extreme west (Damnonii,
Demetae); his general atmosphere is Celtic, and his rhetoric contains no
references to a flourishing civilization. We may conclude that the
Romanized part of Britain had been lost by his time, or that, if some
part was still held by the British, long war had destroyed its
civilization. Unfortunately we cannot trust the traditional English
chronology of the period. As to the date of Gildas, cf. W.H. Stevenson,
_Academy_, October 26, 1895, &c.; I see no reason to put either Gildas
or any part of the _Epistula_ later than about 540.]
It is this Celtic revival which can best explain the history of
Britannia minor, Brittany across the seas in the western extremity of
Gaul. How far this region had been Romanized during the first four
centuries seems uncertain. Towns were scarce in it, and country-houses,
though not altogether infrequent or insignificant, were unevenly
distributed. At some period not precisely known, perhaps in the first
half or the middle of the third century, it was in open rebellion, and
the commander of the Sixth Legion (at York), one Artorius Justus, was
sent with a part of the British garrison to reduce it to obedience.[1]
It may therefore have been, as Mommsen suggests, one of the least
Romanized corners of Gaul, and in it the native idiom may have retained
unusual vitality. Yet that native speech was not strong enough to live
on permanently. The Celtic which is spoken to-day in Brittany is not a
Gaulish but a British Celtic; it is the result of British influences.
Brittany would have sooner or later become assimilated to the general
Romano-Gaulish civilization, had not its Celtic elements won fresh
strength from immigrant Britons. This immigration is usually described
as an influx of refugees fleeing from Britain before the English
advance. That, no doubt, was one side of it. But the principal
immigrants, so far as we know their names, came from Devon and
Cornwall,[2] and some certainly did not come as fugitives. The King
Riotamus who (as Jordanes tells us) brought 12,000 Britons in A.D. 470
to aid the Roman cause in Gaul, was plainly not seeking shelter from
the English.[3] We must connect him, and indeed the whole fifth-century
movement of Britons into Gaul, with the Celtic revival and with the same
causes that produced for instance, the Scotic invasion of Caledonia.
[Footnote 1: C. iii. 1919=Dessau 2770. The inscription must be later
than (about) A.D. 200, and it somewhat resembles another inscription (C.
iii. 3228) of the reign of Gallienus, which mentions _milites vexill.
leg. Germanicar. et Britannicin. cum auxiliis earum_. Presumably it is
either earlier than the Gallic Empire of 258-73, or falls between that
and the revolt of Carausius in 287. The notion of O. Fiebiger (_De
classium Italicarum historia_, in _Leipziger Studien_, xv. 304) that it
belongs to the Aremoric revolts of the fifth century is, I think, wrong.
Such an expedition from Britain at such a date is incredible.]
[Footnote 2: The attempt to find eastern British names in Brittany seems
a failure. M. de la Borderie, for instance, thinks that Corisopitum (or
whatever the exact form of the name is) was colonized from Corstopitum
(Corbridge on the Tyne, near Hadrian's Wall). But the latter, always to
some extent a military site, can hardly have sent out ordinary
_émigrés_, while the former has hardly an historical existence at all,
and may be an ancient error for _civitas Coriosolitum_ (C. xiii (I), i.
p. 491).]
[Footnote 3: Freeman (_Western Europe in the Fifth Century_, p. 164)
suggests that a migration of Britons into Gaul had been in progress,
perhaps since the days of Magnus Maximus, and that by 470 there was a
regular British state on the Loire, from which Riotamus led his 12,000
men. Hodgkin (_Cornwall and Brittany_, Penryn, 1911) suggests that the
soldiers of Maximus settled on the Loire about 388, and that Riotamus
was one of their descendants. He quotes Gildas as saying that the
British troops of Maximus went abroad with him and never returned. That,
however, is an entirely different thing from saying that they settled in
a definite part of Gaul. For this latter statement I can find no
evidence, and the Celtic revival in our island seems to provide a better
setting for the whole incident of Riotamus.
If Professor Bury is right (_Life of Patrick_, p. 354), Riotamus had a
predecessor in Dathi, who is said to have gone from Ireland to Gaul
about A.D. 428 to help the Romans and Aetius. Zimmer (_Nennius Vind._,
p. 85) rejects the tale. But it fits in well with the Celtic revival.]
This destruction of Romano-British life produced a curious result which
would be difficult to explain if we could not assign it to this cause.
There is a marked and unmistakable gap between the Romano-British and
the Later Celtic periods. However numerous may be the Latin personal
names and 'culture words' in Welsh, it is beyond question that the
tradition of Roman days was lost in Britain during the fifth or early
sixth century. That is seen plainly in the scanty literature of the age.
Gildas wrote about A.D. 540, three generations after the Saxon
settlements had begun. He was a priest, well educated, and well
acquainted with Latin, which he once calls _nostra lingua_. He was also
not unfriendly to the Roman party among the Britons, and not unaware of
the relation of Britain to the Empire.[1] Yet he knew substantially
nothing of the history of Britain as a Roman province. He drew
from some source now lost to us--possibly an ecclesiastical or
semi-ecclesiastical writer--some details of the persecution of
Diocletian and of the career of Magnus Maximus.[2] For the rest, his
ideas of Roman history may be judged by his statement that the two Walls
which defended the north of the province--the Walls of Hadrian and
Pius--were built somewhere between A.D. 388 and 440. He had some
tradition of the coming of the English about 450, and of the reason why
they came. But his knowledge of anything previous to that event was
plainly most imperfect.
[Footnote 1: Mommsen, Preface to _Gildas_ (Mon. Germ. Hist.), pp. 9-10.
Gildas is, however, rather more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to
allow. Such a phrase as _ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur_
implies a consciousness of contrast between Briton and Roman. Freeman
(_Western Europe_, p. 155) puts the case too strongly the other way.]
[Footnote 2: Magnus Maximus, as the opponent of Theodosius, seems to
have been damned by the Church writers. Compare the phrases of Orosius,
vii. 35 (Theodosius) _posuit in Deo spem suam seseque adversus Maximum
tyrannum sola fide maior proripuit_ and _ineffabili iudicio Dei_ and
_Theodosius victoriam Deo procurante suscipit_.]
The _Historia Brittonum_, compiled a century or two later, preserves
even less memory of things Roman. There is some hint of a _vetus
traditio seniorum_. But the narrative which professes to be based on it
bears little relation to the actual facts; the growth of legend is
perceptible, and even those details that are borrowed from literary
sources like Gildas, Jerome, Prosper, betray great ignorance on the part
of the borrower.[1] On the other hand, the native Celtic instinct is
more definitely alive and comes into sharper contrast with the idea of
Rome. Throughout, no detail occurs which enlarges our knowledge of Roman
or of early post-Roman Britain. The same features recur in later writers
who might be or have been supposed to have had access to British
sources. Geoffrey of Monmouth--to take only the most famous--asserts
that he used a Breton book which told him all manner of facts otherwise
unknown. The statement is by no means improbable. But, for all that, the
pages of Geoffrey contain no new fact about the first five centuries
which is also true.[2] From first to last, the Celtic tradition
preserves no real remnant of recollections dating from the
Romano-British age. Those who might have handed down such memories had
either perished in wars with the English or sunk back into the native
environment of the west.[3]
[Footnote 1: The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is
obvious tradition or legend. A prince with a Celtic name may have ruled
Kent in 450. There were, indeed, plenty of rulers with barbaric names in
the fourth and fifth centuries of the Empire. But the tale cannot be
called certain history.]
[Footnote 2: Thus, he refers to Silchester, and so good a judge as
Stubbs once suggested that for this he had some authority now lost to
us. Yet the mere fact that Geoffrey knows only the English name
Silchester disproves this idea. Had he used a genuinely ancient
authority, he would have (as elsewhere) employed the Roman name. Another
explanation may be given. Geoffrey wrote in an antiquarian age, when the
ruins of Roman towns were being noted. Both he and Henry of Huntingdon
seem to have heard of the Silchester ruins, and both accordingly
inserted the place into their pages.]
[Footnote 3: The English mediaeval chronicles have sometimes been
supposed to preserve facts otherwise forgotten about Roman times. So far
as I can judge, this is not the case, even with Henry of Huntingdon.
Henry, in the later editions of his work, borrowed a few facts from
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which are wanting in his first edition (see the
All Souls MS.; the truth is obscured in the Rolls Series text). He also
preserves one local tradition from Colchester: otherwise he contains
nothing which need puzzle any inquirer. Giraldus Cambrensis, when at
Rome, saw some manuscript which contained a list of the five provinces
of fourth-century Britain--otherwise unknown throughout the Middle Ages
(_Archaeol. Oxoniensis_, 1894, p. 224).]
But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He who wanders
here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and that which at
one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the quest advances, to
prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and its explorers need to
know something of the regions on both sides of the frontier. I make no
claim to that double knowledge. I have merely tried, using such evidence
as I can, to sketch the character of one region, that of the
Romano-British civilization.
INDEX
Aldborough (_Isurium_), 56.
Arretine pottery, 15.
_Avot_, 27.
_Bannavem Taberniae_, 63.
Bath, 42, 56.
Brittany, migration to, 65.
Bury, Prof., 66.
Caerwent, 50, 56.
Canterbury, deserted after the Roman period, 64.
Cantonal system in Roman Britain, 50.
Carausius, birthplace, 58.
Castor pottery, 40.
Celtic language in Gaul and Britain, 14, 26.
Celto-Roman temples, 30;
houses, 31.
Christianity as affecting language, 15.
Cloth, British, 57.
Corbridge Lion, 43.
Corn, exported from Britain, 57.
Cornwall, Roman remains in, 22.
Demetrius of Tarsus in Britain, 28.
Devonshire, Roman remains in, 22.
Din Lligwy, village at, 37.
Frilford, Romano-British house at, 32.
Gaulish kingdom of A.D. 258, 17.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 68.
Gildas, 64, 66.
Glastonbury village, 45.
Gorgon at Bath, 41.
Henry of Huntingdon, All Souls MS. of, 68 _note_.
Hesione and Hercules, 41.
_Historia Brittonum_, 67.
Houses in Roman Britain, their relation to houses in Gaul and Italy,
31, 34.
_Icinos_, 51.
Imperial domains in Britain, 49
Kent, origin of name, 29.
Late Celtic art, 39.
Latin, used in the provinces, 11, 14;
in Britain, 24.
London, deserted after the Roman period, 64.
Magnus Maximus, army of, 66.
New Forest pottery, 39.
Northleigh, Romano-British house at, 33.
Ogam at Silchester, 62.
Pergamene style in Roman Gaul, 44.
Pitt-Rivers, 45.
Plaxtol, inscribed tile from, 27.
Punic language in Africa, 14.
Ravenna geographer, 52.
Riotamus, 65.
Samian pottery, 16, 44 _note_.
Seebohm, 53.
Silchester--
Ancient names of, 53, 68.
Date of development, 56.
Dyeing works, 57.
Houses of, 34.
Imperial domains at, 49.
Inscribed tiles from, 25.
Latin used in, 24.
Ogam, 62.
Street plan of, 34, 56.
Temples of, 31.
Abandoned, 63.
Temples in Britain and north Gaul, 30.
Towns in Roman Britain, 48 foll.
Villages in Roman Britain, 37, 45.
Vinogradoff, Prof., 36, 46.
Warwickshire, Roman, 22.
York, Roman remains at, 48.
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