The Romanization of Roman Britain

D
cr

! ROMANIZATION
ROMAN BRITAIN

BY F, HAVEBFIELD

EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

Library
ato 5, Canada

HEAD OF GORGON, FROM THE PEDIMENT OF THE TEMPLE OF
SVL MINERVA AT BATH ($). SEE PAGE 53.

Frontispiece

THE ROMANIZATION
OF ROMAN BRITAIN

BY F. HAVERFIELD

THIRD EDITION, FURTHER ENLARGED,
WITH TWENTY-SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1915

OXFOKD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK

TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY

HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

Michael's Coll
Bay and St. Jcscpi St.
Toronto 5, Canada

PREFACE

THE following pages are based on a paper which I read
to the British Academy in 1905 and which, according to
the custom of the Academy, was issued both in its general
' Proceedings ' (ii. 185-217) and separately. In its separate
form it soon ran out of print, and in 1912 the Delegates
of the Clarendon Press published a new edition, revised
and enlarged to about twice its original size. This second
edition is now in turn exhausted ; in issuing a third, I
have revised and in places recast the text, and I have again
increased considerably both text and illustrations. I have
tried to preserve the character of the work as a treatise
on a definite subject which seems to possess quite real
interest and importance ; I have also endeavoured so to
word my matter that the text, though not the footnotes,
can be read easily by any one who is interested in the subject,
without special knowledge of Latin.

I have to add one regret. Last June my friend Franz
Cumont told me that he was writing a volume somewhat
similar to mine, which would describe the Romanization of
his own country, Belgium. In the Roman age Britain and
northern Gaul, which includes the area of Belgium, were so
closely akin in many ways that such a volume from Cumont 's
pen could not fail to cast strong new light on Romano-
British problems : I hoped to learn much from it for the
betterment of this edition. War has come between. His

4 PREFACE

volume has been completed ; it is brilliant, erudite, instruc-
tive, and in addition excellently illustrated (Comment la
Belgique fat romanisee, Vromant, Paris and Brussels, with
sixty-nine illustrations). But it reaches me at the very latest
stage of my printing, and I can refer to it only here, in a
Preface which is a postscript, and in a few footnotes. On
most matters common to the two books our views agree.
There is, indeed, only one point of moment on which they
do not agree. In discussing the types of houses used in
Roman Britain and in northern Gaul, M. Cumont is inclined
to admit more of Mediterranean influence in respect of the
so-called ' corridor house ' than I can do (below, p. 42).

I have to thank Mr. D. Atkinson, Research Fellow
of Reading University College, for various efficient help
in preparing this edition.

IT.

OXFORD,

February 9, 1915.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..... 7

1. THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE ... 9

2. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ROMAN BRITAIN . 23

3. ROMANIZATION OF BRITAIN IN LANGUAGE . . 29

4. ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION . . 36

5. ROMANIZATION IN ART . . . . .48

6. ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE, LOCAL GOVERN-

MENT AND LAND-TENURE .... 57

7. ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION . . . .67

8. CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION ... 74

9. THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER

EMPIRE ....... 80

INDEX 89

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. PAGE

Head of Gorgon from Bath. (From a photo-
graph) ...... Frontispiece

1. The Civil and Military Districts of Britain . . 25

2, 3, and 4. Inscribed tiles from Silchester. (From

photographs) ..... facing p. 30

5. Inscribed tile from Silchester. (From a drawing

by Sir E. M. Thompson) . . . . .30

6. Reconstruction of the Plaxtol Inscription from

various fragments ..... 33

7. Inscribed tile from Plaxtol, Kent. (From a photo-

graph) ...... facing p. 33

8. Fragment of inscribed jar, from Ickleton. (From

a photograph) .... facing p. 33

9. Ground-plans of Romano-British Temples. (From

Archaeologia) ...... 37

10A. Ground-plan of House at Brislington . . 38
10B. Ground-plan of House at Clanville. (From Archaeo-
logia) 38

11. Ground-plan of Courtyard House at Northleigh 41

12. Plan of a part of Silchester, showing private

houses, the Forum, and the Christian Church.
(From Archaeologia) ..... 43

13. Painted pattern on wall-plaster from Silchester.

(Restoration by G. E. Fox, Archaeologia) facing p. 44

14. Plan of British Village at Din Lligwy. (From

Archaeologia Cambrensis) .... 46

15. Plan of House at Frilford 47

10. Late Celtic Metal Work (From a photograph)

facing p. 48

8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. PAGE

17. Fragments of New Forest pottery with leaf

patterns. (From Archaeologia) . . .49

18. Castor Ware. (From photographs) . facing p. 50

19. Hunting Scenes from Castor Ware. (From Artis,

Durobrivae) ..... facing p. 50

20. Fragment of Castor Ware showing Hercules and

Hesione. (After C. R. Smith) . . « . 51

21. Dragon-brooches. (From a drawing by C. J.

Praetor ius) . . . . , ... 52

22. The Corbridge Lion. (From a photograph) facing p. 53

23. Inscription from Caerwent, illustrating cantonal

government. (From a drawing) ... 59

24. Plan of Silchester. (From the author's ' Ancient

Town-planning ', Fig. 31) . ... .63

25. Relief of Diana and Hound from Nettleton. (From

a photograph) .... facing p. 73

26. Relief of Mercury and Rosmerta from Gloucester.

(From a photograph) . . . facing p. 73

27. Ogam inscription from Silchester. (From a drawing

by C. J. Praetorius, Archaeologia) . . .82

Note. For the blocks of the frontispiece and of Figs, 3, 5, 18, 19,
I am indebted to the editor and publishers of the Victoria County
History. For the block of Fig. 12 I have to thank the Royal Institute
of British Architects. The block of Fig. 25 has been kindly lent by
the Bath Branch of the Somersetshire Archaeological Society.

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
manly vigour and political freedom and creative genius and
the energies of the speculative intellect were all alike ex-
cluded. There is, unquestionably, much truth in this judge-
ment. 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 con-
tinent 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. Within
its own sphere of everyday life, it was an epoch of growth in
many directions. Even art moved forward. Sculpture was
enriched by a new and noble style of portraiture and by a
school of historical narrative in stone. Architecture found
new possibilities in the aqueduct of Segovia and the Basilica
of Maxentius.1 But it was only practical ends — the erection
of buildings or the historical representation of men and
deeds — that woke the artistic powers of the Romans. The
greatest work of the imperial age must be sought in its

1 Wickhoff, Wiener Genesis, p. 10 ; Riegl, Stilfragen, p. 272.

10 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

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.

Their efforts took two forms. They defended the fron-
tiers against the barbarians and secured internal peace ;
they developed the civilization of the provinces during that
peace. The first of these achievements was but for a time.
In the end the Roman legionary went down before the
Gothic horseman. The barbarians were many ; x they were
also formidable fighters ; perhaps, without railways and
explosives, no generalship could have wholly kept them
back. But they won no rapid entrance. From the middle
of the second century, when their assaults became violent,
two hundred years passed before they won a real footing,
and the Roman lines were still held in some fashion even in
the beginning of the fifth century. Despotism did not
destroy, nor ease steal away, the manly vigour of the Empire.
Through battles without and tumults within, through the
red carnage of uncounted wars, through the devastations
of great plagues, 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. Even in the art of war they were slow
to learn ; they clung to an obsolete infantry, they neglected

1 Some recent writers, like Dubois in Melanges Cagnat, pp. 247-67,
try to minimize their numbers, but they do not seem to me quite to
prove their case.

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 11

new tactics and new engines. Their successes were those
of character, not of genius. But their phlegmatic courage
saved the Empire through many years and secured for the
lands within the frontiers an almost unbroken quiet. The
age of the Empire is the longest interval — indeed, it is the
one long interval — of peace which has yet been granted to
any large portion of our world.

The long peace made possible the second and more lasting
achievement of the Empire. The lands which the legions
sheltered were not merely blessed with quiet. They were
also given a civilization, and that civilization had time to
take strong root. Roman speech and manners were diffused ;
the political franchise was extended ; city life was estab-
lished ; the provincial populations were assimilated in an
orderly and coherent culture. A large part of the world
became Romanized. The fact has an importance which,
even to-day, we might easily miss. It is not likely that any
modern nation will soon stand in quite the place which Rome
then held. Our civilization seems firmly set in many lands ;
our task is rather to spread it further and develop its good
qualities than to defend its life. If war destroy it in one
continent, it has other homes. But the Roman Empire was
the civilized world ; the safety of Rome was the safety of all
civilization. Outside roared the wild chaos of barbarism.
Rome kept it back, from end to end of Europe and across
a thousand miles of western Asia. Had Rome failed to
civilize, had the civilized life found no period in which to
grow firm and tenacious, civilization would have perished
utterly. The culture of the old world would not have lived
on, to form the groundwork of the best culture of to-day.

The Empire did not, of course, grow into a nation, in the
sense in which we now use that word. It resembled modern
Austria rather than France or Germany. But it gained —
what Austria has missed — a unity of sentiment and culture
which served some of the purposes of national feeling. Late
in its days, about A.D. 400, a Greek from Egypt, who was
also the last great Latin poet, wrote a remarkable praise

12 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

of Rome. She (he sang) alone of conquerors had taken to
her bosom the world which she had subdued ; she had been
mother, not mistress, and to her men owed it that from
Rhone to Orontes — from the Atlantic to the sands of the
Arabian desert — they were all one people.1 Claudian was
probably echoing here an earlier Greek litterateur. But that
neither makes him insincere nor his words untrue. He felt,
and felt rightly, that Romanization was a real thing. The
Empire had passed out beyond the narrower ideal of military
dominion, which at its birth Vergil had set forth in famous
verses.2 Rulers and ruled had assimilated ; a civilized life
had grown up which even its barbarian assailants learnt to
honour and accept and which they passed on to later ages.
This Romanization was real. But it was, necessarily, not
altogether uniform and monotonous throughout all the wide
Roman lands. Its methods of development and its fruits
varied with local conditions, with racial and geographical
differences. It had 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 cohe-
rent form. That has in all ages checked Imperial assimila-
tion ; it was the decisive hindrance to the full 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. Such, for example, were Alexandria Troas,
close by ancient Troy, or Antioch in Pisidia, lately explored

1 Quod cuncti gens una sumus, Claudian, de cons. Stilichonis, iii.
150-9. The idea seems taken from Aelius Aristides, who in his
* Praise of Rome ' called her TTCLVTCUV nrjrrjp and speaks of the Empire as
fjda xo>/>a avvfxvs fol ev <}>v\ov : he wrote in the middle of the second
century.

2 Aen. vi. 847 foil, lu regere imperio populos, etc.

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 13

by Sir W. M. Ramsay, or Berytus on the Syrian coast. The
colonists, the speech, the constitutions of these settlements
were Roman, and now and again their citizens won high office
at Rome. From Troas, to quote one case only, came the
Quintilii who held four consulships in the later second cen-
tury and who dwelt in the largest of all the palaces in the
Campagna of Rome. But in one after another of these towns
the Roman element perished like an exotic plant.1 The
Romanization of these lands was political. Their inhabi-
tants learnt to call and to deem themselves Romans. They
did not adopt the Roman language or much of the Roman

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 Prussian (for example) over
Pole, where the individualities of two 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 the ancient
Egyptian from the Italian, or that which now divides the
Frenchman from the 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.

1 Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, p. 147 ; Kubitschek, Festheft
Bormann (Wiener Studien, xx. 2), pp. 340 foil. ; L. Hahn, Rom und
Romanismus im griechisch-rom. Osten (Leipzig, 1906). One reason for
the loss of Roman culture is indicated by inscriptions like C. iii. 6800
(from the interior of Asia Minor), on which a veteran of Legio xii '
Fulminata commemorates a wife with the purely native name of Ba.
This legionary must have had some knowledge of the Latin language
and the Roman civilization : his children probably had none.

14 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

Even their geographical position helped somewhat in-
directly 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 influ-
enced 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 govern-
ment 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.
Much was due to official encouragement by statesmen who
cherished the ideal of assimilating the provinces or who recog-
nized more cynically that civilized men are easier ruled than
savages.1 More, perhaps, was spontaneous. The definite
and coherent culture of Rome took hold on uncivilized but
intelligent provincials and planted in them the wish to learn
its language and share its benefits. And this wish was all
the keener since Roman tolerance drove no one into uni-
formity. The compulsion to accept another speech and
another nationality which has been laid at one time or
another on Slav or Magyar or Alsatian French in modern
Europe — always with unsuccess — was no part of Roman
policy. Rome made her culture more attractive by not
thrusting it upon her subjects.

The most potent single factor in the Romanization was
the town. Italian civilization was itself based on city life ;

1 Tacitus (Agr. 21) emphasizes this : ut homines dispersi ac rudes,
eoque in bella faciles, quiet i et otio per voluptates adsuescerent,
hortari privatim adiuvare publice ut templa fora domos exstruerent.
. . . Idquc apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars seroitutis
esset.

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 15

it was natural that the Empire should diffuse that life,
especially in the provinces of western and central Europe
which had few towns or none before they came under Roman
rule. The most common step in this direction, at least in
the early Empire, was the foundation of coloniae, munici-
palities on the Italian pattern, manned by time-expired
legionaries (men who were citizens of Rome and spoke
Latin1), laid out on Roman town-plans,2 decorated with
Roman street-names and in all essentials Roman cities. 5
These coloniae were not meant altogether as missionaries
of culture. Primarily, they served as informal fortresses.
When Cicero3 describes one of them, founded under the
Republic in southern Gaul, as ' a watchtower of the Roman
people and its outpost against the tribes of Gaul ', he states
an aspect of such a town which obtained during the first
century of the Empire no less than in the Republican age.
Nevertheless, they inevitably became centres of Roman life,
and though, being somewhat artificial military creations,
they were liable, as in the east (p. 13), to be gradually
merged in the peoples round them,4 most of them escaped
this fate and really helped in Romanization.

Other towns were less direct official creations. Often,
native provincial markets or other centres of life grew so
far Romanized that they were held to merit the rights and
status of a Roman municipality, and the wisdom of the
Roman government in recognizing such progress was well
repaid by the development of fresh centres of Roman civili-
zation. Often, the legionary fortresses attracted traders,
women, veterans and others to settle outside their gates
but under the shelter of their ramparts, and their canabae,

1 Till about A.D. 70 most of the legionaries were Italians ; later,
they were recruited in the provinces but they regularly came from
towns which were adequately Romanized. Tiberius mililem Graece
teslimonium interrogatum nisi Latine rcspondere vetuit (Suet. Tib. 71).

2 I may refer to my Ancient Town-planning (Oxford, 1913), ch. viii.

3 Pro Fonteio 13. So Tac. Ann. xii. 27 and 31, Agr. 14 and 32.

* Even Colonia Agrippinensis (Cologne) on the Rhine nearly fell
victim to this at one moment, Tac. Hist. iv. 65.

16 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

or ' bazaars ', to use an Anglo-Indian term, grew not seldom
into cities, worthy of municipal position. No doubt in all
these towns it was the municipal aristocracies which were
especially Roman. Like the German municipal elements in
mediaeval Cracow and elsewhere in eastern Europe, they
rested on a stratum which was less civilized. Yet we shall
see below that in many provincial Roman towns even the
lower stratum was Roman or Romanized.

Towns were not the only factors in the process. Provin-
cials who seemed ripe for it often received grants of the
franchise individually or in large bodies. The abler pro-
vincials who became Romanized found careers open to them
at Rome. Everywhere was practical inducement for the
native to enlist in the Roman culture. Weight, too, must
be ascribed to the drift of Italians into the provinces. This
was not a population-making emigration, like the present-
day mass emigrations of the Italian lower classes. It was
rather a drift of men from the well-to-do middle classes,
merchants and others, who formed little Roman centres
where neither troops nor Roman municipalities existed.1
It was just such an emigration as that by which mediaeval
Germans helped to civilize parts of Galicia and Hungary
and to diffuse some sort of town-life through them.2 If it did
not Romanize on the lines along which we have Anglicized
Australia, it was still a strong culture-making force. It
added its aid to the spread of town-life and to the willingness
of the provincial to carry Romanization through.

The process is hard to follow chronologically, 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

1 Schulten, de conventibus civium romanorum ; Kornemann, de civibus
row. in provinciis imperil consistentibus. For an example take an
inscription from Bourges in Aquitania, pro salute Caesarum et p. /?.,
Minervae et divae Drusillae sacrum in perpetuum, C. Agileius Primus
vi. vir Aug., c(urator) c(ivium) r(omanorum), dating from A.D. 38-40
(C. xiii. 1. 1194).

2 R. F. Kaindl, Geschichte der Deutschen in den Karpathcnlandern.

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 17

we can assign the Celtic, Iberian, and Punic inscriptions
which occur occasionally in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, the
strange sculptures of three-headed or horned or cross-legged
deities in northern Gaul, the use of native titles like Ver-
gobret 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 second and third centuries of the Empire there is
a change. Roman elements now dominate ; in most regions
native survivals are few. But they are not merely few ;
they no longer stand out in hostile contrast with the Roman
civilization. The two have harmonized ; amalgamation has
gone forward. Indeed, one province can show from this age
a few native items unknown in earlier days of Roman rule.
In Gaul, or rather in some districts of that large area, the
Celtic measure of distance, the ' leuga ' of about 2,500 yards,
appears on official milestones in place of the Roman mille
passus,1 while the Druids, banned by the first Emperors,
emerge from their hiding, though in very humble fashion.
But these things are plainly not due to anti-Roman or even
un-Roman feeling. The real position can be seen best in the
curious ' Gallic Empire ' of A. D. 25S-73.2 Here Roman elements
dominated, but they mixed in friendly fashion with native
things. The emperors of this state were called not only
Latinius Postumus, but also Piavonius and Esuvius Tetricus.
Its coins were inscribed not only ' Romae Aeternae ' and
' Spei Publicae ', but also ' Herculi Deusoniensi ' and
1 Herculi Magusano '. It not only claimed independence
of Rome, but it modelled itself on Rome. It had its own
senate and consuls ; just as at Rome, tribunicia potestas was
conferred on its ruler, and the title princeps iuventutis on its
heir-apparent. We see Gaulish rulers with Gaulish names
appealing in some sort to native memories and at the same

1 The ' leuga ' does not occur in the first century ; in the second it
displaced the Roman measure in certain districts, and later it was used
still more freely. But it never got into Gallia Narbonensis.

• An admirable account of this has recently been given by M. Camilla
Jullian in his Ilistoire fie la Gaule, iv. 570-92.

1751 B

18 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

moment fully accepting Roman fashions, speech and political
institutions. The native element in Gaul had not quite
died out of mind, but it had become little more than a pic-
turesque contrast to the Roman. If this Gallic Empire in
some details recalls the past, it still more looks forward.
Its independence, its cry of ' Gaul for the Gauls ', is a geo-
graphical fact, not a racial survival. It demanded indi-
vidual life, and doubtless also individual protection from
the barbarians, for a Roman section of the Roman world.
It anticipated the birth of new nations.

Progress in Romanization was perhaps slowest in lan-
guage, especially in the remoter districts of the Empire.
In Roman Africa, Punic was in almost official use in towns
like Gigthis, in the Syrtis, as late as the second century, and
Punic-speaking clergy were needed in outlying villages even
in the fourth century. In Gaul, Celtic is stated l to have
been spoken at the same epoch among the Treveri, who
lived round what is now Trier. Presumably the native idiom
lingered on in the vast woodlands of the Eif el and Hunsriick
and Ardennes and in the hills above the upper Mosel valley,
from which uncouth uplanders came down to sell forest-
produce in towns, where they must have looked as strange
as the Gorals of to-day in the streets of Cracow or Lemberg.
On the borders of Gaul and Spain, in the shadowy valleys
of the Pyrenees, Basque must have survived throughout the
Roman age, as it has done ever since. On the high plateau
of Asia Minor, where Greek was the dominant tongue of
civilized folk, six or seven other dialects, Galatian, Phrygian.
Lycaonian, and the rest, lived on till a very late date, espe-
cially (as it seems) on the wild and remote pastures of the
Imperial domain-lands.2 Some of these are survivals, noted

1 Jerome, comment, in epist. ad Galatas, ii. 3. He is the only authority
and his accuracy has been doubted. But other survivals can be
quoted from this region ; here, for instance, in the secluded region of
Birkenfeld, the Celto-Roman culture is said to have resisted Germaniza-
tion long after the lowlands had succumbed. (Cumont, Belgique
romanisee, p. 95, takes the same view as I have given above.)

- K. Holl, Hermes, xliii. 240-54 ; W. M. Ramsay, Oesterr. Jahreshefle,

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 19

at the time as exceptional, and counting in the scales of
history for no more than the survival of Croatian in a few
villages of the Italian Abruzzi or of Wendish (Sorb) fifty 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.1

In material culture the Romanization advanced quickly.
One uniform fashion spread from the Mediterranean through-
out central and western Europe, driving out native art and
substituting a conventionalized copy of Graeco-Roman or
Italian art, which is characterized alike by technical finish
and neatness, and by lack of originality and 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, chiefly at Arezzo. Early in
the first century south 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 and even Italy were supplied with
their ' 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 recalls native Gaul.
Throughout, it is imitative and conventional, and, as often

viii (1905), 79-120, quoting, amongst other things, a neophrygian text
of A.D. 259 ; W. M. Calder, Hellenic Journal, xxxi. 161.

1 Mommsen (Rom. Gesch. v. 92) ascribes the final extinction of Celtic
in northern Gaul to the influence of the Church. But the Church was
not itself averse to native dialects ; its insistence on Latin in the west
may be due rather to the previous diffusion of that language. (I am
glad to see that Cumont (p. 109) agrees with me.)

B2

20 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

happens in a conventional art, items are freely jumbled
together which do not fit into any coherent story or sequence ;
many Gaulish potters seem to have been mainly anxious to
leave no undecorated spaces on their bowls. At its best, it
is handsome enough, though its possibilities are limited
by its brutal monochrome. But it reveals unmistakably the
Roman character of the civilization to which it belongs.

This Romanization in material things means more than
is always recognized. Some scholars, in particular (perhaps)
philologists, write as if the external environment of daily
life, the furniture and decorations and architecture of our
houses, the buckles and brooches of our dress, bear no rela-
tion to our personal feelings, our political hatreds, our
national consciousness. That may be true to-day of Asiatic
or African who dons European clothes once or again for
profit or for pleasure. It was not true of the Roman pro-
vincial. When he adopted, and adopted permanently, the
use of things Roman, we may say of him, firstly, that he had
become civilized enough to realize their value, and further,
that he had ceased to bear any national hatred against them.
Such hatred must have existed here and there ; Tacitus
hints that it existed for a little while in Britain. But it was
rare ; we can argue from the spread of Roman material
civilization that provincial sentiment was growing Roman.

By what process the less material aspects of provincial
life became Roman is less clear, because it was necessarily
more subtle. We seem, however, to see, at least in western
Europe, the same harmonious amalgamation of dominant
Roman elements with native elements that have not been
wholly absorbed. In the east, of course, town-life and local
government and land-tenure were mainly Hellenistic ; Ro-
manization here made little way. But in the west there were
towns enough of Roman foundation and Roman character
(p. 15), with yet an intersprinkling of native developments.
In northern and western Gaul, for instance, Roman munici-
palities (strictly so called) were wanting. Nevertheless,
towns sprang up here, some through Roman official eneour-

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 21

agement and some of spontaneous growth. These towns
were a cross between Roman and Gallic. They were the
' chef s-lieux ' of native cantonal areas and their local govern-
ment was native. But the titles of their magistrates were
borrowed from the Roman municipal terminology and their
government was assimilated to the Roman municipal pattern ;
even their town-plans were in some cases ' chessboards ' of
the received Italian type.1 We shall meet some such towns
in Britain. In other provinces, as in southern Spain, hardly
a trace occurs of anything outside the strict Roman system.
So again in the sphere of religion. The Roman Empire
was generally tolerant of not-Roman worships, save in the
cases of Druidism and Christianity. It was rewarded. In
the western provinces the natives welcomed the Graeco-
Italian pantheon, identified their own gods with one or
another of its members, or, in default of identification, con-
tinued their old cults under new Latin names such as deae
matres. Religion is seldom logical or uniform, and the pre-
cise value to be put on these identifications doubtless varied
with every case and perhaps with every worshipper. Some-
times we may think we can see the old gods living on behind
their Roman masks and indeed keeping their power into the
Middle Ages. More often, Roman and native coalesced, and
again the exact proportions of the mingling must have in-
finitely varied. Some of the native cults seem to have sur-
vived more vigorously in the consciousness of the worshippers
than the others ; the one thing in which they agree is that
the Roman and the native are not hostile. There was
nothing unnatural to the provincial in honouring a Mercury
who was decked out in wholly Roman attributes — wand
and winged cap and purse and the rest — but who was placed
beside a provincial companion whose attributes declare her
the Celtic goddess Rosmerta (p. 73). The French scholar
Boissier once wrote that the civilized world was never nearer
to a common creed than under the Empire. Had it been
realized, it would have been a very complex creed.

1 See my Ancient Town-planning, p. 120 and Fig. 29.

22 THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

It remains true, of course, that, till a language or a custom
is wholly dead and gone, it can always revive under due con-
ditions. 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 singu-
larly few instances, but it would be untrue to say that there
were none.

Romanization was, then, a complex process with complex
issues. It does not mean simply that all the subjects of
Rome became wholly and uniformly Roman. The world is
not so monotonous as that. In it two tendencies were
blended with ever- varying results. First, Romanization
extinguished the difference between Roman and provincial
through all parts of the Empire but the east, alike in speech,
in material culture, in political feeling and religion. When
the provincials called themselves Roman or when we call
them Roman, the epithet is correct. Secondly, the process
worked writh different degrees of speed and success in different
lands. 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 certain regions, not in active oppo-
sition, but in latent persistence, capable of resurrection under
proper conditions. In such a case the provincial had become
a Roman, but he could still undergo an atavistic reversion
to the ways of his forefathers.

CHAPTER II

PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ROMAN BRITAIN

ONE western province seems to break the general rule.
In Britain, as it is described by many English writers.
Roman and Briton were as distinct as modern Englishman
and Indian, and ' the departure of the Romans ' in the early
fifth century left the natives almost as Celtic as their coming
had found them nearly four hundred years before. 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 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, 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 best agrees with the evidence which we possess in
respect of Britain. In the following paragraphs I wish 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 almost wholly a priori, and they
have led different scholars to very different conclusions.
The philological arguments are no less beset with difficulties.

24 ROMAN BRITAIN : PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Both the facts and their significance are obscure, and the
inquiry into them has hitherto yielded little beyond con-
fident and yet contradictory assertions which are incapable
of proof. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand,
is definite and consistent. 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 philo-
logical arguments do not yield.

I need not here insert a sketch of Roman Britain. But
I may call attention to three of its features. In the first
place, it is necessary to distinguish the two halves of the
province, the northern and western uplands occupied only
by troops, and the eastern and southern lowlands which
contained nothing but civilian life (Fig. I).1 The two are
marked off, not in law but in practical fact, almost as if
one had been dorni and the other militiae. We shall not find
much trace of Romanization in the uplands. There neither
towns existed nor villas. Northwards, no town or country-
house has been found beyond the neighbourhood of Aid-
borough (Isurium), some fifteen miles north-west of York.
Westwards, on the Welsh frontier, the most advanced towns
were at Wroxeter (Viroconium), near Shrewsbury, and at
Caerwent (Venta Silurum), near Chepstow, and the furthest
country-houses two isolated dwellings at Llantwit Major,
in Glamorgan, and Llanfrynach, near Brecon.2 In the south-
west the last country-house was near Lyme Regis, the last
town at Exeter.3 These are the limits of the fully Romanized

1 For details see the Victoria County Histories of Northamptonshire,
i. 159, and Derbyshire, i. 191. 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 various 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.

2 See my Military Aspects of Roman Wales, notes 60 and 82. There
was apparently some sort of town life at Carmarthen.

3 West of Exeter Roman remains 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 consists of : one

B

1. (A) THE CIVIL, (B) THE MILITARY DISTRICTS OF BRITAIN.

2tf ROMAN BRITAIN : PRELIMINARY REMARKS

area. Outside of them, the population cannot have acquired
much Roman character. Within these limits were towns
and villages and country-houses and farms, a large popula-
tion, and a developed and orderly life.

This sharp division between the military and civilian areas
suggests that the garrison of Britain — the three legions at
York, Chester, and Caerleon, and the ' auxiliaries ' scattered
in castella, perhaps 30,000 or 35,000 men in all — had little
influence on the civilization of Britain. At York, indeed,
a town grew up outside the fortress (p. 57). But neither
York nor Caerleon seem to have much affected the two
country-towns near them, at Aldborough and Caerwent ;
few other traces of civilization occur near either fortress,
and Chester lay wholly beyond the pale. Possibly, as
M. Cumont has observed,1 the provisioning of the troops
brought landowners and farmers into contact with the
Roman system. But in general Britain must have, in this
respect, differed much from northern Gaul and the Rhine
frontier. There six legions and their * auxiliaries ' watched
150 miles of frontier during the earlier Empire, and their
influence on the Romanization of the border is very plain.

Secondly, the distribution of civilian life, even within these
limits, 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,
Essex, and Somerset are set thick with ruins of country-
houses and similar vestiges of Romano-British life. Other

early settlement on Plymouth harbour ; another near Bodmin, of small
size, dating from the later first century ; 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, at Tintagel church and 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.
1 Journal of Roman Studies, ii. 113.

ROMAN BRITAIN : PRELIMINARY REMARKS 27

portions of the same counties, southern Kent, northern
Sussex, south-eastern Essex, western Somerset, show few
traces of any settled life. The midland plain, and in par-
ticular 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 at all.

Lastly, Romano-British life was on a small scale. It was, 1
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 else-
where, and farms and country-houses. But the towns are
small and somewhat few, and the country-houses indicate
comfort more often than wealth. So, too, the costlier
objects of ordinary use, fine mosaics, precious glass, gold
and silver ornaments, occur comparatively seldom,2 and
such as do occur, seem to be almost wholly imports. The
great ' Lanx ', for instance, which was picked up on the bank
of the Tyne near Corbridge, is not only the one eminently
important piece of Roman silver found in the province ; it
is also in all likelihood a product of the eastern Empire.3
In Roman Britain we have before us a civilization which,
like a man whose constitution is sound rather than strong,
might perish quickly from a violent shock.

A caution must be added. Geographically, Britain is an
island tied closer than is always realized to the continent of
Europe. The British lowlands are in the east and south ;
right over against them, across a narrow sea, are the low-
lands of the continent ; the rivers of island and continent
flow out opposite each other ; it is easy from either shore
to reach the other coast and to pass up into the land behind
it. In both pre-Roman and Roman times it was constantly
done. Therefore the same Celtic races dwelt on both sides
of the sea ; there was frequent intercourse and the same or

1 Viet. Hist, of Warwickshire, i. 228.

2 See my remarks in Traill's Social England (illustrated edition, 1901),
i. 141-61.

3 Journal of Roman Studies, iv (1914), 1-12, with illustration.

28 ROMAN BRITAIN : PRELIMINARY REMARKS

nearly the same civilization spread over northern Gaul and
Britain from the Rhine to the Atlantic. In the districts
of military life this civilization was crossed by the beliefs
and customs and fashions of the soldiers ; elsewhere we deal
with a Romano-Celtic — originally Celtic — civilization which
requires to be studied more or less as a whole. It is useless
to examine Roman Britain or Roman Gaul or even much of
Roman Germany without constant reference to this whole,
and much good work attempted by modern French or
German or English archaeologists has failed to yield its
proper fruit from neglect of this fact.

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 has
been detected, 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
Celtic inscriptions are not unknown in Gaul (see p. 31). 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 northern military region. But
they appear also in towns and country-houses of the low-
lands, and some of the instances are significant.

The town site which we can best examine for our present
purpose is Calleya Atrebatum (Silchester), ten miles south
of Reading, which has been completely excavated within
the circuit of its walls. It was a small town in a stoneless
country ; it can never have had many lapidary inscriptions,
and such as there were must have been eagerly sought by
later builders. Nevertheless, a few fairly perfect inscrip-
tions on stone and many fragments have been found here
and prove that the public language of the town was Latin.1

1 For these and for the following graffiti see my accounts in the
Viet. Hist, of Hampshire, i. 275, 282, and Eph. Epigr. ix. 984-8 and
1292-4 ; for the Clementinus tile see also Archaeologia, Iviii. 30.

30 ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE

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 brickmaker scrawls SATIS (enough) with his finger
on a tile, or some prouder spirit writes CLEMENTINVS FECIT
TVBVL(WW) (Clementinus made this box-tile) ; when a bit
of Samian is marked FVR (thief), presumably as a warning
from the servants of one house to those of the next, or a brick
shows the word PVELLAM, part of an amatory sentence
otherwise lost, or another brick gives a Roman date, the
4 sixth day before the Calends of October ', we may be sure

FIG. 5. GRAFFITO ON A TILE FOUND AT SILCHESTER (p. 30). Pertacits
perfidus \ Campester Lucilianus \ Campanus, conticuere omnes.

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 (Fig. 5).1 The examples are so numerous and
remarkable that they admit of no other interpretation.2

1 Sir E. M. Thompson, Greek and Latin Palaeography (1894), p. 211,
first suggested this explanation ; Eph. ix. 1293.

2 I have not, of course, quoted all. To call them — as did a kindly
Belgian critic of this paper in its first published form — ' un nombre de
faits trop peu considerable ' is really to misstate the case.

.-!

FIG. 2. ... puellam.

FIG. 3. Fecit tubul(um) Clementinus.

FIG. 4. vi k(alendas) Octo[bres. . . .
FIGS. 2-4. GRAFFITI ON TILES FROM SILCHESTER. (SEE p. 30.)

30

ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE 81

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.
The doubt 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 reason to believe 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 (p. 16) that the emigrants of the
Imperial age were not labourers, as they are to-day. They
were traders, dealers in land, money-lenders, or other ' well-
to-do ' persons. The labourers and the 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 town, no Celtic inscription
has emerged. Instead, we have proof that its 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. In Gaul, potters of Roman date could scrawl
their names and records, Sacrillos avot, c Sacrillus pctter ',

32 ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE

Valens avoti, ' Valens potter ', on a mould.1 No such scrawl
has ever been found in Silchester or indeed in Britain. In
Gaul, men with Roman names, Martialis and the like, could
set up inscriptions couched wholly or almost wholly in Celtic.
No such inscriptions occur in Britain. The Gauls, again,
could invent a special letter D to denote a special Celtic
sound and keep it in Roman times. No such letter was
used in Roman Britain, though it appears on earlier
British coins. This total absence of written Celtic cannot
be a mere accident.

No other Romano-British town has been excavated so
fully or so scientifically as Silchester. None, therefore, has
yielded so much evidence. But we have no reason to con-
sider Silchester exceptional. Such scraps as we possess
from other towns point to similar Romanization elsewhere.
FVR, for instance, recurs on a potsherd from the Romano-
British country town at Dorchester in Dorset. London
has yielded a tile on which, before it was baked hard, some
one scratched in unconventional Latin the remark, 'Austalis
goes off on his own daily for a fortnight.5 Austalis — that
is, Augustalis — was plainly a workman ; so was his critic,
and their fellow- workmen could presumably read and appre-
ciate the criticism.2 Leicester, too, supplies a tile scratched
Primus fecit x, ' Primus has made ten tiles.'

The rural country-houses and farms, mostly ill-explored
and ill-recorded, furnish much scantier evidence than a care-
fully excavated town. Yet they are not without their
Roman inscriptions cut on stone, for the most part dedica-
tions or tombstones, which prove that at least the owners
or occupiers of the houses claimed to know Latin. Of the
more cogent graffiti on tiles or potsherds, examples are rare.

1 Avot or avotis seems to be a Gaulish term for ' potter '. One
example, Sacrillos avot form., suggests a bilingual sentence such as we
find in some Cornish documents of the period when Cornish was
definitely giving way to English.

2 Austalis dibus (i.e. diebus) xiii vagatur sib(i) cotidim. See my
notes in Eph. Epigr. vii. 1141 and Journal of Roman Studies, i. 168,
plate xxvi.

FIG. 7. INSCRIBED TILE FROM PLAXTOL, KENT.

The top of the tile shows traces of the line parictabin and most of the line Cabriabami ;
the lower part shows the former in full and the traces of the latter. The third line
(. . . icavU) has here, as on all the fragments, failed to come out clearly, (p. 33.)

FIG. 8. FRAGMENT OF INSCRIBED JAR FROM ICKLETON, CAMBS. (P. 33,)

ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE 33

But the man who made the tiles for a house at Plaxtol in
Kent thought it worth while to cover them with Roman
lettering ; apparently he incised the legend in three lines on
a wooden cylinder and rolled it over the tiles while soft,
thus producing a recurrent inscription, 4 Cabriabanus (or
Cabriabantus) made this wall-tile ' which served as a sort

FIG. 6. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PLAXTOL INSCRIPTION FROM
VARIOUS FRAGMENTS.

The legend is, line 1 PARIETALEM, 2 CABRIABANVs (or
NTVs), 3 ... ICAVIT ; line 1 is topsy-turvy to the rest. In the above,
CAB in 2 and IT in 3 are repeated twice, to show the recurrence of the
lettering.

of decoration (Figs. 6 and 7).1 Again, two pieces of a
blackish urn found long ago in the Roman farm at Ickleton,
in south-east Cambridgeshire, bear a graffito which may be
completed ex ha]c amid bibun[t, ' from this jar friends drink '
(Fig. 8).2 Yet once more, a Roman site near Easton Grey,
in north Wiltshire, has yielded a little bas-relief carved
(as it seems) in local stone with the figures of a goddess and
three worshippers ; the mason has roughly signed it, Civilis
fecit, l Civilis made me.'

1 Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond. xxiii. 108 and Eph. ix. 1290.

2 C. vii. 1335. 7. Now at Audley End, where I have seen it.
Too little remains of the jar to fix its date ; it does not suggest the
later Empire.

1751 C

34 ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE

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 workpeople 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. It is not, how-
ever, in itself 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 towns like
Czernowitz.

It remains to cite the literary evidence, distinct if not
abundant, as to the use of Latin in Britain. Agricola, as
is well known, encouraged 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, as Plutarch mentions in his tract on the
cessation of oracles, one Demetrius of Tarsus, a 'grammarian',
was teaching in Britain (A. D. 80), and his teaching is recorded
as nothing out of the ordinary course.1 Rather later, in
A.D. 96, Martial boasts that he was read in Britain, and
about A.D. 120 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.

1 See Eph. Epigr. ix. 560 and Dessau, Hermes, xlvi. 156.

ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE 35

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 the
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 are common. Trustworthy results are corre-
spondingly scarce. One instance may be cited in illustra-
tion. It has been argued that the name ' Kent ' is derived
from the Celtic ' Caution ', and not from the Latin ' Cantium ',
because, according to the rules of Vulgar Latin, ' Cantium '
would have been pronounced ' Cantsium ' in the fifth cen-
tury, 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 4 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 as early as 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 argument
based on the name thus collapses. It would be impossible
here to go through the 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 example because it
has lately been emphasized by an eminent writer.1

1 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 102. I am indebted to
Mr. W. H. Stevenson for help in relation to these philological points.

C2

St. Michael's Ccl^e Library

Bay and St. Joseph St.

Toronto 5, Canada

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 to the conquering foreign influence.

I. 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 with the Romans. The fora, basilicas,
and public baths of the towns, such as have been discovered
at Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, follow Roman models
and resemble similar buildings in other provinces. The
streets of the towns seem also to have been laid out on the
4 chessboard ' system of town-planning proper to Roman
municipalities of the Empire ; to this point I shall return
in a later chapter (p. 64). The temples, however, both in
town and country, show as a rule something more of a local
pattern. They consist generally of a small square or nearly
square cella or shrine, with a roofed portico or colonnade
running round all its four sides, and an entrance usually
from the east (Fig. 9) ; the building often stands in a large
open irregular enclosure. This type of temple occurs at
Silchester and Caerwent and on many rural sites ; it occurs
also in northern Gaul and as far east as the Rhine. It
differs from the ordinary classical type, and is taken by good

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 37

authorities to be of Celtic origin ; it may, however, be a varia-
tion from the classical type or even an amalgamation of
classical and native.1

CAE RWENT

SIUCH € STER

FEET
FIG. 9. Two GROUND-PLANS OF ROMANO-BRITISH TEMPLES.

II. The private houses, by which I mean those built for
civilized occupants, present more complicated features. Like
dwelling-houses all the world over, they exhibit many
varieties.2 But we can distinguish two main types, called
by English writers the Corridor and the Courtyard types.
In the corridor house the front was formed by a narrow hall
or corridor, which usually terminated at one or both ends
in a largish room projecting slightly in wing-fashion. Houses
of this class were common in Roman Britain. Many were
small and poor ; in the Frilford farmsteading, shown in
Fig. 15, the wing-room must have been almost the only

1 For Gaulish instances of these temples, see Leon de Vesly, Les
Fana de la region Normande (Rouen, 1909) ; for Germany, Banner
Jahrbiicher, 1876, p. 57, Hettner, Drei Tempelbezirke im Trevirerlande
(Trier, 1901) and Trierer Jahresberichte, iii. 49-66 ; they occur as far
south as the Auvergne. The English writers who have published
accounts of these structures have tended to ignore their special char-
acter. The temple unearthed at Wroxeter in 1913 seems to have
belonged to the classical type, like that at Lydney.

2 In the Victoria History (Hants, Northants, Shropshire, Somerset)
I have given some twenty-five plans, which make up a fairly repre-
sentative series.

FIG. 10A. CORRIDOR HOUSE AT BRISLINGTON, NEAR BRISTOL
(see p. 39) (for scale see Fig. lOs).

CLANVILLE

10 20 30 40 so Feet

FIG. IDs. HOUSE AT CLANVILLE, NEAR ANDOVER, HANTS.

(See p. 39.)
[HYP. = hypocaust ; TESS. = plain tessellated floor.]

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 39

comfortable apartment, and much of the house may have
served farm purposes. Others were more luxurious ; cor-
ridor houses at Brading, and at Brislington, near Bristol
(Fig. lOA), seem to have been the homes of wealthy owners.

In the second or Courtyard type, the rooms were ranged
along corridors which enclosed three — less commonly two
or four — sides of a spacious squarish yard (Fig. 11). Such
houses were naturally extensive, and many were clearly the
residences of rich men. In one form or another they are
not much less common than the corridor houses. But the
two types run into one another, and it is sometimes hard to
decide whether a house consisting of a centre and two short
wings should be called a corridor house with wing-rooms
overgrown or a courtyard house with stunted flanks.

A third and far rarer type shows a narrow oblong building, '
generally furnished with living-rooms at each end, while
a double row of columns runs down its central portion.
Its ground-plan strangely resembles that of a great columned
barn, but it is possible that the middle space between the
columns was really open to the sky and that the columns
supported the roofs of sheds or colonnades. Some houses
of this type possessed good mosaics and comfortable fittings ;
more often they were subsidiary to better houses of the
courtyard or corridor type, standing close by them and pro-
viding perhaps quarters for servants and the like. Fig. 10s
shows one of these houses in which parts of the original
sheds or colonnades have been built up into rooms.1

Corridor and courtyard houses occur freely both in town
and in country ; the third type has been as yet detected
only in the country. It is noteworthy that no special type •
of town-house occurs. Apart from a few shops — simple
structures with shop in front and living-rooms or stores
behind — the dwellings of Silchester (Fig. 12) and Caerwent
are much the same as those of the countryside, and what is
known of other towns, of Wroxeter or Aldborough, tells the
same tale. Excavation may some day show us town-houses
1 Viet. Hist. Hants, i. 302, 316 ; Archaeol. Journ. Ixvi. 35.

40 ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

somewhere, but we have enough evidence already to conclude
that the distinction between town-houses and country-houses
was substantially unrepresented in Roman Britain. Here,
however, we touch on a feature of Romano-British town-
life which belongs rather to Chapter VI.

Britain is not peculiar in its two main types of houses.1
Like the temples described above (p. 36), courtyard and
corridor houses recur in very similar forms in northern Gaul.
From the seacoast to the Rhine they are indeed the dominant
types of houses.2 At present they are attested only as
country-houses, but that is perhaps because no complete
town-house has yet been uncovered in any Roman town
of this region. The general likeness of Roman Britain to
northern Gaul suggests that Amiens, Reims, Metz,3 did not
in this respect differ very greatly from Silchester.

The origin of these two northern types has been much dis-
cussed. English writers tend to think them Celtic, since they
occur in Celtic lands ; they also see in the corridor an element
common to both types, and suggest that the courtyard type
grew out of the corridor type by gradually pushing forward
its wing-rooms and continuing the corridor in front of them.
Foreign writers more often derive them from types of houses
used in Italy and the Greek east. Probably the material
does not yet exist for a full settlement of the problem ; for
one thing, we know too little of the rural dwellings of Italy,
large or small. It is clear, however, that the Italian houses
most familiar to us, the town-houses of Rome and Pompeii,
bear no likeness to the northern houses. Their central
feature is an atrium, and there is not an atrium to be found
in any house in Roman Britain.

1 The type of Fig. 10s seems purely British.

2 Some plans of north Gaulish and German country-houses and
farms are given by de Caumont, Abecedaire (ed. 2, 1870), pp. 379 foil.,
and Kropatschek, VI. Bericht der rom.-germ. Kommission, 1910—11,
pp. 57-73. For others see the Annales of the Namur Archaeological
Society and similar journals.

3 Nor perhaps even Trier : a half-explored town-house at Trier is not
at all Pompeian (Banner Jahrb. ciii. 236).

BATHS

BATHS

ENTRANCE

FIG. 11. COURTYARD HOUSE AT NORTHLEIGH, OXFORDSHIRE, AS
EXCAVATED IN 1815-16. Room 1, chief mosaic with hypocaust ;
rooms 8-18, mosaic floors ; rooms 21-7 and 38-43, baths, &c. ; the
west wing had poorer rooms, perhaps for servants. Recent excava-
tions show that this plan represents the house in its third and latest
stage ; in the corridor (10) a part of the earlier house-front is shown
by dotted lines. The pottery found in the recent excavations suggests
that the first house on this spot was built not later than the early
second century.

42 ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

Probably the courtyard house has more connexion with
the south than the corridor house. The town-houses of the
Greek east and the kindred houses of Timgad in Africa, of
Pola and Doclea in Adriatic lands — houses that are built
round a small columned court or peristyle — offer faint
parallels to our courtyard houses. Indeed, one or two
houses at Silchester and Caerwent actually have such small
courts.1 More definite parallels, again to the courtyard type,
can be found in other houses, mostly country-houses, of
the same Greek type, which were built round large peristyles
comparable in size to the spacious British and Gaulish
yards.2 Perhaps we may conclude that our courtyard house
owed much of its development to this originally Greek
type. And if the peristyle house excavated in 1882 at
Bibracte (Mont Beuvray), in mid-France, be of pre-Roman
date, as Dechelette thought, we may further guess that
this type was spreading northwards as early as the age of
Caesar.3

But the corridor house remains unfathered. To it Mediter-
ranean lands offer no analogies. It had neither atrium nor
peristyle, and the attempts of some scholars to detect pictures
of it on two African mosaics are not convincing.4 The most
southern corridor house which I can quote was dug up years

1 Silchester, insula xiv. 1 (Archaeologia, Iv. 221) ; Caerwent, house 3
(Arch. Ivii, plate 40). A few Pompeian houses have no atrium and
belong to this type ; for instance, ins. v. 5 and vi. 15. Similarly, parallels
may be drawn between certain Pompeian wall-paintings of houses
and certain large houses in Germany, as at Nennig, Rouhling, Wittlich
(see Rostowzew, Archdol. Jahrbuch, 1904, p. 103). But such houses
are rare in Germany and unknown in Britain.

2 For instance, the large house of Fannius Sinistor near Pompeii ;
a large house near Pola (Schwalb, Romische Villa bei Pola, Wien,
1902), an oil-farm on the same coast (Gnirs, Jahrbuch fiir Altertums-
kunde, ii. 134) ; a large house at Saint-Leu in Algeria (Revue africaine,
1894, p. 230), and the luxurious house in the town of Uthina (Oudna,
in Tunis, see Fondation Piot, iii. 177).

3 Bulliot, Fouilles de Mont Beuvray ; Dechelette, Manuel, ii. 953.

4 Kropatschek (see p. 40, note) assumes that the corridor house was
common in Italy. But that is pure assumption ; certainly the Bosco
Reale farm is quite different. His arguments suffer also from his
general neglect of all finds outside Germany.

FIG. 12. PART OF SILCHESTER. Showing some private houses and
shops, the Forum, and the Christian Church. (From the plan by
Sir W. Hope, issued by the Society of Antiquaries.)

44 ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

ago near Pau.1 Perhaps, after all, we may credit it with
a Celtic origin. That is the conclusion for which we should
look on general grounds — that the larger and richer houses
copied foreign patterns, while the smaller ones, like the
Indian bungalow, tended to follow native lines. Here, as
elsewhere, the Romanization of Britain combined native
and Roman elements.

The internal^ fittings of these houses show the Roman
supremacy more definitely. These fittings are wholly bor-
rowed from Italian sources. If we cannot find in the
Romano-British house either atrium or impluvium, tdblinum
or peristyle, such as we find in Italy, we have none the less
the painted wall-plaster (Fig. 13) and mosaic floors, the
hypocausts and bathrooms 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 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,2 or Apollo chasing Daphne, or Actaeon rent by his
hounds, or of geometrical devices like the so-called Asiatic
shields which are of classical origin.3 Perhaps we may
detect in Britain a special fondness for the cable or guilloche
pattern, and we may conjecture that from Romano-British

1 Archaeol. Journ. xxxvi. 17.

2 There is no reason to think the numerous Orpheus mosaics Christian.
Christianity was not so ubiquitous as that. The scene, I imagine, was
popular because it included various quaint animals.

3 It has been suggested that these mosaics were laid by itinerant
Italians. The idea is, of course, due to modern analogies. It does
not seem impossible, since the work is in a sense that of an artist, and
the pay might have been high enough to attract good decorators 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 could
export skilled workmen to Gaul (p. 77). They have also the look of
work imitated 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 much the same fashion — they are local products.

FIG. 13. PAINTED PATTERN ON WALL-PLASTER FROM SILCHESTER.

Showing a conventional style based on classical models (p. 44).

(Restoration by G. E. Fox, in Archaeologia.)

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 45

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.

III. Turn now to the^wellings of the peasant poor. These
we know only in one corner of southern England, but within
this limit we know them well. On the chalk downs of Wilts
and north-east Dorset, Colt Hoare was busy a century ago,
and in 1884-90 Pitt-Rivers dug three villages wholly up —
at Woodcutts, Rotherley and Woodyates, a dozen miles
south-west of Salisbury — and later workers have continued
the search.1 In plan these villages are not Roman ; their
round mud-huts and pits, their strange ditches, their shape-
less enclosures, date from days before or early in the Roman
occupation. But Roman civilization soon reached and
absorbed them. The ditches were filled up ; hypocausts,
odd but unmistakable, wall-plaster painted in Roman
fashion, roofing of Roman tiles, came into use ; the villagers
learnt to eat and drink from Samian dishes and cups of glass,
and even to keep their clothes in wooden chests of drawers ;
some of them could read and write.2 Meanwhile, they
utterly forgot their Celtic fashions ; there is no sign of the
Late Celtic art in any of Pitt-Rivers's multitudinous illustra-
tions. To these men the Roman objects which they used
were the ordinary environment of life ; they were no ' delicate
exotic varnish', as one eminent writer has called them.3
Indeed, I cannot find in our Romano-British remains the

1 R. Colt Hoare, Ancient Wiltshire (1812-21); A. Pitt-Rivers, Excava-
tions in Cranborne Chase, <&c. (four large quartos, privately printed,
1887-98) ; M. E. Cunnington, Wilts Archaeol. Magazine, xxxvii. 42,
xxxviii. 53 ; Hey wood Sumner, Excav. on Rockbourne Down (London,
1914).

2 Pitt-Rivers, iii. 3-6. So Colt 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.'

3 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 39.

46 ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

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 buildings
and all degrees of comfort connected them ; there is no
discernible breach in the scale. Throughout, the dominant
element is the Roman provincial fashion which is borrowed
from Italy.

' '° a° 3° sa *° " *° <co

peer

FIG. 14. NATIVE VILLAGE AT DIN LLIGWY, ANGLESEA.

We find Roman influence even in the most secluded
villages of the upland region. At Din Lligwy, on the north-
east coast of Anglesea, excavation (Fig. 14) 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

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION 47

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 signs of proper Roman occupation can
be detected, while its ground-plan shows little mark of
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.

1 E. Neil Baynes, Arch. Cambrensis, 1908, pp. 183-210.

FRILFORD

FIG. 15. PLAN OF FARMHOUSE AT FRILFORD, BERKS. (From plan by
Sir A. J. Evans). See p. 39. The scale is the same as that of Figs. 10A
and B on p. 38.

CHAPTER V

ROMANIZATION IN ART

ART shows a rather different picture. Here the definite
survivals of Celtic tradition are not perhaps more numerous
but are certainly more tangible. 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 (Fig. 16).
This art — La Tene or Late Celtic or whatever it be styled —
was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the
Christian era, and 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 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 wholly. Little local manufactures
of small objects witness to sporadic survivals. Such, among
pottery, are the New Forest stoneware with its curious leaf-
ornament (Fig. 17), which was used a good deal in southern
Britain,1 and the better known and far more widely dis-
tributed Castor ware, made on the banks of the Nen some
five miles west of Peterborough. We may briefly examine
this latter instance.

1 Victoria Hist. Hants, i. 326 ; Archaeol* Joiirn. xxx. 319»

FIG. 16. LATE CELTIC METAL WORK (3).

Boss of a shield, of perhaps the first century B.C., found in the Thames
near Wandsworth, and now in the British Museum. See p. 48.

ROMANIZATION IN ART

49

At Castor and Chesterton, on the north and south sides
of the river, were two Romano-British settlements of com-
fortable houses, furnished in genuine Roman style. Round
them stretched extensive pottery works, which seem to have
been active during the greater part of the Imperial period.
The ware, or rather the most characteristic of the wares

FIG. 17. FRAGMENTS OF NEW FOREST POTTERY WITH LEAF PATTERNS.
(From Archaeologia.) See p. 48.

made in these works, is generally called Castor (or sometimes
Durobrivian) ware. It was not, indeed, peculiar to the
potters of the Nen valley. There is evidence that, to some
small extent at least, it was made elsewhere in Britain, and
it must have been produced freely in northern Gaul, though
none of its kilns has yet been identified there ; possibly it
was produced there first and afterwards copied in Britain.
But Castor is the only attested centre of its manufacture

1751 D

50 ROMANIZATION IN ART

on a large scale, and the cups and jars from its potteries
seem not only to be more abundant but also more varied in
decoration and sometimes more directly inspired by native
elements than the continental fabrics.1

Castor ware was decorated by the method often called
4 barbotine ' ; the ornament was in relief and was laid on by
hand in the form of a semi-liquid ' slip ' with the aid of a tube
or other tool — just as in the later Roman Empire the orna-
ment was laid on glass,2 or as in our own day it is put on
sugar-cakes. Every piece is, therefore, the individual product
of a potter, not a mechanical cast from a mould. From this
point of view it is noteworthy that the British Castor ware
directly embodies the Celtic tradition. If it was copied
from the Continent, the island potters either took over with
it an element which has all but disappeared from the
Gaulish work, or else they added that element. Castor ware
is based, indeed, on classical patterns — foliated scrolls, hunt-
ing scenes, gladiatorial combats, even now and then a mytho-
logical representation. But it recasts these patterns in
accordance with its own traditions and also with the vigour
of a true art. Those fantastic animals with strange out-
stretched legs and back-turned heads and eager eyes ; those
tiny scrolls scattered by way of background above and below
them ; the rude beading which serves, not ineffectively,
for ornament or for dividing line ; the suggestions of return-
ing spirals ; the manifest delight of the artist in plant and
animal forms — all these things are Celtic (Figs. 18, 19).

When we turn to the scenes in which man is prominent—
a hunting picture in which (exceptionally) the huntsman

1 Good illustrations of continental Castor ware are given in Sammlung
Niessen, Koln, 1911, plates 77, 78. Continental manufacture, possibly
near Cologne, seems to be proved by the amount of the ware found
in the Low Countries, North France and Germany. In Germany the
production is said to have begun before A.D. 100 and to have ceased
soon after A.D. 200. Its decoration is almost wholly confined to rather
stereotyped animals, but the Colchester * gladiators' urn ', mentioning
the Thirtieth Legion (C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant. iv. 82 ; C. vii. 1335. 3),
may be Rhenish manufacture.

2 Kisa, Glas im Altertume, ii. 475.

r.o

1

50

ROMANIZATION IN ART

51

appears, or a chariot race, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione
fettered naked to a rock and Hercules saving her from the
sea-monster (Fig. 20) l — we do not always find the same skill
and vigour. From of old the Celtic artist had been averse
to representations of the human form. When with an
initiative lacking in his continental rival — an initiative

FIG. 20. HERCULES RESCUING HESIONE. (From a piece of Castor ware
found in Northamptonshire. C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant., vol. iv, PI. XXIV.)

which it is fair to recognize — he added this to his repertory,
he passed beyond his proper bounds. Now and then he suc-
ceeded ; more often he failed ; his Hercules and Hesione
are not fantastic but grotesque. In taking in new Roman
elements, his Celtic art lost its power and approximated to
the conventionalism of Samian ware.2

1 This and the corresponding scene of Perseus and Andromeda were
popular in Britain and Gaul. See (e.g.) a tombstone at Chester
(Grosvenor Museum Catal. No. 138), and others at Trier (Hettner,
Steindenkmaler zu Trier, p. 206) and Arlon (Wiltheim, Luciliburgensia,
plate 57) and Igel. Whether the scenes generally conveyed any
symbolical meaning in these lands, I should greatly doubt.

2 For an account of Castor and Castor ware see Viet. Hist. Northants,
i. 166-78, 206-13.

D2

52

ROMANIZATION IN ART

Brooches tell much the same tale of predominant Roman
fashions not unmixed with Celtic survivals. Many of those
found in Britain are peculiarly British. One of the com-
monest of Romano-British 4 fibulae ', commoner in the north
than in the south of the island, is not only directly traceable
to a Celtic ancestry, but is very rare outside Britain.1 The

examples which have
been found in northern
Gaul and Germany can
almost be counted on
the fingers of two hands ;
and when a specimen
once turned up near
Frankfurt, it so startled
the local archaeologists
that they assigned it to
Africa. But the most
striking example is sup-
plied by the enamelled
' dragon-brooches ' (Fig.
21). Both their designs
and their gorgeous colour-
DRAGON-BROOCHES ' FOUND jng are Celtic in spirit ;

they occur not seldom

FIG. 21.

AT CORBRIDGE (y). (P. 52.)

in Britain ; from the Continent only four instances are
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 Britain would show, especially in
the south, a dominant army of types which were equally
common here and on the Continent and belong to the
Roman provincial civilization. The ' Aucissa ' and * knee '
and 4 cross-bow ' varieties may serve as examples.

1 For the origin of the type see A. J. Evans, Archaeol. Iv. 182 ;
for illustrations and for the distribution, my note, Arch. Aeliana, 1909,
p. 400, and Curie, Newstead, p. 321.

2 I have given a list in Arch. Aeliana, 1909, p. 420 ; see also Curie,
Newstead, p. 319, and R. A. Smith, Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond. xxii. 61.
In all about twenty examples have been noted in Britain.

FIG. 22. THE CORBRIDGE LION. (P. 53.)

ROMANIZATION IN ART 53

Perhaps it is to this survival of the Celtic spirit in a
Romanized Britain that we should ascribe two remarkable
sculptures found at Bath and at Corbridge. The Spa at
Bath (Aquae Sulis) contained a stately temple to Sul or
Sulis Minerva, goddess of the hot springs. 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 (?), a cuirass,
besides other details now lost. 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 (see
Frontispiece). 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 male attributes to
a female type. For our present purpose the important fact
is that he could do it. Here is proof that, for once at least,
the supremacy of the dominant conventional art of the
Empire could be rudely broken down.1

Another example is supplied by the Corbridge Lion, found
among the ruins of Corstopitum in Northumberland in 1907
(Fig. 22). It is a sculpture in the round showing a nearly
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. Technically,
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

1 For the temple and pediment see Viet. Hist. Somerset, i. 229 foil.,
and references given there ; I have discussed the artistic problem
on p. 235 and Journal of Roman Studies, ii. 132. Quite recently,
M. Adolphe Reinach has suggested that the head embodies a definite
Celtic idea (Bull, du musee de Mulhouse, xxxvii).

54 ROMANIZATION IN ART

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

These exceptions to the ruling Roman provincial culture
are rare in Britain. But they are probably commoner here
than in the Celtic lands across the Channel. In northern
Gaul we meet no such vigorous semi-barbaric carving as the
Gorgon or the Lion. At Trier, Metz, Arlon, Sens, there are
notable sculptures, but they 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.2

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 pre-
dominantly 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.3 This ware is charac-

1 Arch. Aeliana, 1908, p. 205 ; Journal of Roman Studies, ii. 148.

2 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 produced in Roman times, early intercourse seems an inadequate
cause. Moreover, Pergamene work, if rare in Italy, occurs in Aquitania
and Africa, and may have been popular in the provinces.

3 I may protest against the attempts made from time to time to
dispossess the term ' Samian '. Nothing better has been proposed, and
it has the merit of perfect lucidity. Of the substitutes suggested,
' Pseudo-Arretine ' is clumsy, ' Terra Sigillata ' is at least as incorrect,
and ' Gaulish ' covers only part of the field (Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond.
xxiii. 120).

ROMANIZATION IN ART 55

teristic of Roman provincial art. As I have said, it is copied
wholesale from Italian originals (p. 19). It is purely imita-
tive 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.

The contrast between this Romano-British civilization
and the native art 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 carefully
excavated in the south-west of England, hardly thirty miles
apart. The Celtic village was close to Glastonbury in Somer-
set.1 Of itself it was a small, poor place — just a group of
pile-dwellings rising out of a marsh and dating from the two
centuries immediately preceding the Christian era. Yet,
poor as it was, its art is distinct. There one recognizes all
that delight in decoration and that genuine artistic instinct
which mark Late Celtic work, while technical details in 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 and already mentioned in these pages
(p. 45). Here you may search in vain for vestiges of the
native art or of that delight in artistic ornament which
characterizes it. The ground-plans of the villages, the forms
of the poor cottages, are native ; the art is Roman. Every-
where the monotonous Roman culture meets the eye. To
pass from Glastonbury to Woodcutts is like passing from

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.

56 ROMANIZATION IN ART

some old timbered village of Kent or Sussex to the uniform
streets of a modern city suburb. Life at Woodcutts had, no
doubt, its barbaric side. One writer who has discussed it
with a view to the present problem 1 comments on c dwellings
connected with pits used as storage rooms, refuse sinks, and
burial places' and 'corpses crouching in un-Roman positions'.
The first feature has its parallels in modern countries and
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 Roman
civilization in its higher aspects. Perhaps they did not
speak Latin fluently or often. They may well have counted
among the less Romanized of the southern Britons. Yet
round them too clung the heavy inevitable atmosphere of
the Roman material civilization.

1 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 in the latter part of the first century.
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 (Dessau, Inscr. sel. 8379).

That earlier native forms of burial were used in Roman Britain is
shown by the remarkable burial mounds of the first and second
centuries at Bartlow Hills in NW. Essex (Archaeol. xxv, xxvi, xxviii,
xxix), Mersea Island (Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. xiii. 116), Rougham
(Viet. Hist. Suffolk, i. 315), Gorsley Woods in East Kent (Arch. Can-
tiana, xv. 311), Thornborough in Bucks (remains at Audley End), and
Youngsbury, in Herts (Archaeol. Hi. 287). They occur also in Belgium ;
see Annales de la Soc. arch, de Namur, xxiv. 50, and now Cumont
Belgique romanisee, p. 88.

•

,. /!„ _c " -rr— ,».

CHAPTER VI

ROMANIZATION IN ToWN-LlFE, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND
LAND-TENURE

I HAVE now dealt with the language and the material
civilization of the province of Britain. I pass to a third
and harder question, the administrative framework of local
Romano-British life, the town-system and local government,
and the land-tenure. Here we have to discuss especially
the extent to which the Roman coloniae and municipia
penetrated the province and the substitutes which arose
instead of them, and the diffusion and influence of the
Roman 4 villa '. In respect to the towns and the local
government, it has to be remembered that Roman, like
Greek, towns were each the head of a dependent district,
and therefore what we might now call the town and the
county government more or less coincided.

I. First, the towns. Britain, we . know, contained five
municipalities of the privileged Italian type. The colonia of
Camulqdunum (Colchester) and the municipium of Veru-
lamium (St. Albans), both in the south-east of the island,
were established soon after the Claudian conquest of A. D. 43.
The colonia of Lindum (Lincoln) was probably founded in
the early Flavian period (A.D. 70-80), when the Ninth
Legion, hitherto at Lincoln, seems to have been pushed
forward to York. The colonia at Gleyum (Gloucester) arose
in A.D. 96-98, as an inscription definitely attests. 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. _ ^fp )

1 The fortress was situated on the left or east bank of the Ouse ;
the present cathedral stands wholly within its area. Parts of the

58 ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE

.doubtless, its dependent territory, which may have been as
large as an average English county, and each provided the
local government for its territory.1 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 a liberal estimate, for
barely one-eighth of the civilized part of the province.

Throughout most of the rest of the British province,
or rather of its civilized area, the local government was
probably organized on the same cantonal system as obtained
in northern Gaul (p. 21). According to this system, the local
unit was the former territory of the independent 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 govern-
ment 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 municipiwn. So far from wearing
a native aspect, this cantonal system 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 institu-
tion 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

Roman walls can still be traced, especially at the Multangular Tower.
The municipality lay on the other bank of the Ouse, near the railway
station, where mosaics indicate dwelling-houses. Its outline and plan
are, however, unknown. Even its situation has not been generally
recognized.

1 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 (Eph.
Epigr. vii. 1105 =ix. 1253, and vii. 1097). The general size of these
municipal ' territoria ' is proved by Continental inscriptions.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-TENURE 59

wealthy than those of Gaul, and therefore they have not
left their mark, either in monuments or in nomenclature, so

•XI T T ':-

~. *M V * "<&/>.

,

iPV&bClV.IT -

FIG. 23. INSCRIPTION FOUND AT CAERWENT MENTIONING A DECREE
OF THE SENATE OF THE CANTON OF SILURES. SEE P. 60.

clearly as we might desire. Many inscriptions record the
working of the system in Gaul. Many modern towns —
Paris, Reims, Amiens, and thirty or forty others — derive

60 ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE

their present names from those of the ancient cantons, and
not from those of the ancient towns. Britain has hitherto
yielded only one such inscription (Fig. 23), x on a monument
erected at Caerwent (Vent a Silurum) by the cantonal senate
of the Silures to some general of the Second Legion at Isca
Silurum, twelve miles off. Only one British town was called
in antiquity by a tribal name — and that is a doubtful
instance.2 No single case occurs in which a modern town-
name is derived from the name of a British 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 compiled at Ravenna somewhere
about A.D. 700, and which, as its author's name is lost, is
generally quoted as the work of 4 Ravennas '. It consists
for the most part of lists of names, copied from sources far
earlier than the seventh century, and very carelessly copied.
In general it adds very few details. But in the case of
Britain it notes the municipal rank of three of the four
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, and Corinium Dobunorum
(Cirencester), not Corinium simply. The towns thus specially
marked out are just those towns which are also declared by

1 Found in 1903 : . . . leg. leg. [i]i, Aug. proconsul(i) provinc. Nar-
bonensis, leg. Aug. pr. pr. provi. Lugudunen(sis) : ex decreto ordinis
respubl(ica) civit(atis) Silurum. It was probably set up to Claudius
Paulinus, early in the 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.

2 Icinos in Itin. Ant. 474. 6 may be Venta Icenorum (Victoria Hist,
of Norfolk, i. 286, 300). In its Gaulish section the Itin. uses these
tribal town-names about as often as not.

* 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, Ordo vices, have lingered on in one form or another ; accord-
ing to Prof. Rhys, Bernicia is derivable from Brigantes. But these
cases differ widely from the Gaulish instances.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-TENURE 61

actual remains to have been the chief country towns of
Roman Britain. This coincidence can hardly be chance.
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, presumably muti-
lated and imperfect, has been preserved by some chance in
this late corrupt compilation.1

In other words, the larger part of Roman Britain was
divided up into districts corresponding to the territories
of the Celtic tribes ; each has its capital, and presum-
ably its magistrates and senate, as the above-mentioned
inscription shows that the Silures had at Vent a 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 northern Gaul, 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.

Municipalities and cantonal capitals furnish nearly all the
known examples of Romano-British towns. Two or three
lesser places may have been secondary country-towns.2
A spa, rather than a town proper, flourished at Bath, and
attracted invalids from Britain and from northern Gaul.
There is only one important addition to be made to our
list. Londinium sprang up in the earliest Roman period,
on a spot marked out by trade advantages rather than by

t

1 Ravennas (ed. Parthey and Finder), pp. 425 foil. ; my Appendix
to Mommsen's Provinces of the Empire (English trans., 1909), ii. 352.
The places are those now known as : Exeter, Winchester, Caerwent,
Cirencester, Silchester, Canterbury, Wroxeter, Leicester, Castor by
Norwich, and probably Chichester : to these we may add from other
sources Aldborough (Yorks) and Dorchester in Dorset.

2 Rochester in Kent and Kenchester near Hereford are the only
ones which merit mention here.

62 ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE

any noteworthy native settlement ; it quickly grew to be
the largest and richest town in the province. But we never
hear that it won municipal rank, and its civic constitution
rested perhaps on a different basis. We know from Tacitus
that it began as a gathering of traders round a convenient
centre. We know also that the Roman provinces contained
many such clubs or communities of Roman traders, ruling
themselves on a quasi-municipal pattern (16, note 1). We
may think that London was, at the outset, one of these
communities, and that, while most of them grew into muni-
cipalities, it kept its original status unaltered. The Empire
was as full of irregularities as the Greek accidence, and
Roman opportunism loved to let well alone. London in
the fourth century gained the title — honourable, if not
rare — of Augusta, but remained in its quasi-municipal
position.1

On paper this represents much Romanized town-life in
Britain. Did the facts bear out the theory ? On the whole,
we may say that they did. The Romano-British towns
were of fair size. Silchester was by no means the biggest.
Roman London, perhaps even Roman Cirencester, were
larger than Roman Cologne or Bordeaux ; Verulam and
others were not so far behind.2 They possessed, too, the
buildings proper to a Roman town — town-hall, market-place,
public baths, 4 chess-board ' street-plan, all of Roman
fashion ; they had also shops and temples, and even here
and there a hotel ; and it is to be noted that these were
present not only in the municipalities, as it seems, but in

1 Londinium is often credited with wonderful features — territory,
pomerium, citadel, jurisdiction to a mile outside its gates, and so forth.
No true view of it can be got, unless these be put aside.

2 Within the walls, London was about 325 acres, Cirencester a little
over 240, Cologne 240, Verulam 200, Silchester, Colchester and Leicester
110-100 acres. Comparisons, however, are difficult, even where the
walled area is known, since sometimes (at London, Silchester, Trier,
Cologne) the walls seem to have enclosed the town at near its largest,
while elsewhere the walled area is but a fragment left after Teutonic
invasion. For Bordeaux see Jullian, Inscr. de Bordeaux, ii. 588 ;
at its zenith, he tells me, it perhaps covered 185 or 200 acres.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-TENURE 63

the cantonal capitals as well. Whether and how far the
municipalities had a stronger Roman colouring than the
other towns, we do not know. But we can see that their
Roman constitutions were realities ; witness the tiles of
Roman Gloucester, with their stamp RPG (respublica
Glevensium) and their dating by municipal magistrates,
the ' duoviri ' and ' quinquennales '.

NORTH GATE

SOUTH GATE

FIG. 24. (P. 64. )

Other details point somewhat the other way. We should
have expected the British municipalities, like those of other
provinces, to have helped in supplying the Roman army
with legionaries and the Roman administration with officials.
But, so far as present evidence goes, few Britons served in

64 ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE

the legions and hardly any won official rank. Again, the
plans of the towns known to us reveal a significant feature,
which I have noted already (p. 40). The dwelling-houses
in them are not town-houses, fitted to stand side by side
and to form regular streets ; they are country-houses, such
as neither did nor could combine in continuous rows ; they
are dotted about like cottages in a village (Figs. 12, 24).
One recognizes that the town-planning of Silchester or
Caerwent was introduced amid surroundings not fully urban
and that it represents an attempt at municipalization for
which the dwellers in Calleva and Venta were not ready.
These men learnt town-life from Rome. They did not learn
it in its highest form. Indeed, through all the rebuildings
which the spade reveals in these towns, they clung till the
end to their older rural fashion.1

Those who weigh these facts against one another will con-
clude, I think, that the Roman town-system of Britain was
a real thing. It contained native as well as Roman elements ;
here, as elsewhere, Romanization was a subtler and more
complex process than mere absorption in Rome. The towns,
too, were neither many nor very large ; here, as elsewhere,
Romano British life was on a small scale. But in one way
or another and to a real amount, Britain shared in that
expansion of town-life which formed a special achievement
of the Roman Empire.

The towns and the districts connected with them occupied
most of the British lowlands. Whatever was over, fell prob-
ably within the Imperial domains, which covered wide tracts
in every province and were administered by local ' procura-
tors ' of the Emperor. The lead-mining districts — Mendip in
Somerset, the neighbourhood of Matlock in Derbyshire, the
Shelve Hills south-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 what seems to be one early
1 See further my Ancient Town-p* ^ning, pp. 127-35.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-TENURE 65

instance at Silchester in the reign of Nero l — perhaps the
confiscated estates of some British prince or noble — and
though we have no further direct evidence, the history 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 extent.
Moreover, if we may trust analogies from Asia Minor, they
probably contributed little to Romanization (p. 18).

II. It remains to say what little can be said as to the
land-tenure of the province. Evidence on this point is un-
fortunately very scanty. We know next to nothing about
either the size or the character of the estates which corre-
sponded to the country-houses and farms of which remains
survive. The ' villa ' system of demesne farms and serfs
or coloni,3 which obtained elsewhere, was doubtless familiar
in Britain. Indeed, the Theodosian Code definitely refers
to British coloni* 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.5 It is quite likely that here, as indeed in any

1 Tile inscribed NERCLC^EATGG3l, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus
Germanicus (Eph. ix. 1267). It differs markedly from the ordinary
Silchester tiles, 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 fall ; compare Plutarch, Galba, 5. The Combe
Down principia (C. vii. 62), which are not military, may supply
another example, of about A.D. 210 (Viet. Hist. Somerset, i. 311 ;
Eph. ix. 516).

2 Hirschfeld, Klio, ii. 307, 308. Much of the Gaulish domain land
appears to date from confiscations in A.D. 197.

3 The term ' villa ' is now generally used to denote Roman 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 in this paper
employed the term ' villa ' only where I refer to the definite 4 villa '
system.

4 Cod. Theod. xi. 7. 2.

8 For instance, Seebohm (English Village Community, pp. 254 foil.)
connected the suffix ' ham' with the Roman ' villa' and apparently
argued that the occurrence of the suffix indicated in general the former
existence of a ' villa '. But his map. showing the percentage of local

1751

66 ROMANIZATION IN TOWN-LIFE

province, other forms of estates and of land-tenure may have
existed beside the 4 villa '-1 The one thing needed is evidence.
Unfortunately, the sizes and relative positions of the country
dwellings do not, of themselves, reveal much in this respect.
In some Rhenish districts the houses are so uniform in plan
and so evenly distributed as to suggest settlements of veteran
soldiers. In Britain the evidence at present known points
to a system which has grown up of itself but does not show
the exact nature of that system.

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 pro-
vinces. Whatever room there may be for the survival of
native customs or institutions, we have 110 evidence that
they survived, within the lowlands, either in great amount
or in any form which conflicted with the general Romanized
character of the country.

names ending in ' ham ' in various counties, disproves his view. For
the distribution of the suffix ' ham ' and the frequency of Roman
country-houses and farms do not coincide. In Norfolk, for instance,
4 ham ' is common, but there is hardly a Roman country-house or
farm in the county (Victoria Hist, of Norfolk, i. 294-8). Somerset, on
the other hand, is crowded with Roman country-houses, and has
hardly any ' hams '.

1 Prof. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, chap. ii. argues for the
existence of Celtic land-tenures besides the Roman ' villa '. 4 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). This is very probable. But I find no definite
proof of it. If northern Gaul were better known, it might provide
a decisive analogy. But the Gaulish evidence itself seems disputable.

CHAPTER VII

ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION

THE current religions of the modern world, monotheistic
in character and eastern in origin, are exclusive ; no man
can be in any real sense Mahometan and Jew at once. The
polytheisms of ancient Europe contained little to hinder
combinations of creeds, and the Romans, being politic as
well as polytheistic, encouraged the process. They had easily
equated their own Italian gods with the gods of Greece ; the
provincials found it no harder to combine native provin-
cial cults with the Graeco-Roman religion. The western
half of the Empire thus became a blending- vat of worships,
western and eastern and Roman. The ruling element was
Roman. The native cults of western origin survived — at
least on the surface — mainly as appendages of Roman
deities, and even the far stronger eastern cults, Mithraism
and the rest, took on somewhat of Roman dress. The out-
come was too vague and ill-defined, and too various in
different lands, to be called a Roman provincial religion.
Rather, an equation of worships was established under
Roman primacy, by which a man who changed his town '
or province, could change his gods as easily as he changed his
washerwoman.

This happened also in Britain. The inscriptions and
sculptures of our province show a mass of diverse cults
which were united in their use of Latin and in their common
Roman colouring. In detail, however, the military districts
differ widely, as so often, from the districts of civilian life,
in which the Romanized provincials dwelt. We may best
group our survey into (1) cults which seem strictly Roman,
(2) others which may be called Romano-Celtic, and (3)

E 2

68 ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION

•

others again which came to Britain from sources neither
Roman nor Celtic, but either Teutonic or Oriental.

I. Purely Roman dedications, such as an Italian might
have set up in Italy, are common enough in the military
area. There we meet altars to luppiter Optimus Maximus
and other true gods of Rome, without any intermixture of
non-Roman religion. But they are altogether rare in the
towns and country districts. A few exceptions can be noted.
At Chichester in the middle of the first century a Roman-
izing native princelet set up a monument to Neptune and
Minerva. In the midlands, near Stony Stratford, a man
with a Celtic name, Vassinus, made some sort of offering to
Jove and Vulcan. A shrine in the Cots wolds contained a
figure of a god in full armour, carved in stone, with the
superscription deo Romulo, ' to the god Romulus.' In a
few places we meet altars set up simply to Mars or Mer-
cury or Aesculapius or Diana. But the total list of these
plain Roman dedications is short. Nor do we hear more
of the official worship of the Emperor. Dedications to his
Divinity (numina Augustorum, &c.) arc frequent in forts
and fortresses. Elsewhere they are scanty. In the colonia
of Camulodunum was a temple for the official cult of Rome
and the Emperor ; some years ago a boy fished out of a
Suffolk stream a bronze head which was probably pillaged
from it in the rising of Boudicca. But we hear next to
nothing about the cult. It not only had no religious value ; it
had not even the social importance which it enjoyed in Gaul.

II. Far commoner are Romano-Celtic and native dedi-
cations.1 Many of these are dedications to Roman gods with
Celtic epithets, to Mars Belatucadcr, Mars Cocidius, Mars
Corotiacus,— not to Mars simply. It does not appear that
the varieties of Mars which were thus created wielded different
powers, or that you prayed to Mars Belatucader for one sort
of favour and to Mars Cocidius for another ; that doubtless
happened to some extent, but it does not seem to have been
common. We may say rather that scattered, mostly local,

1 Anwyl's article in the Cambridge Medieval History, ii. 472-9, is,
I fear, unsatisfactory.

ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION 60

cults crystallized round Roman names. It was, however,
only a few Roman gods — in Britain and in north Gaul
Mars and Mercury — who attracted Celtic epithets to them-
selves at all freely. Apollo, Diana, Juno, Neptune, and the
rest appear comparatively seldom or even never with them.
On the other hand, a long series of dedications concern
gods whose names are purely Celtic except for their Latin
terminations. These are many. But they do not greatly
differ from those just described ; indeed, many Celtic deities
appear now with, now without, the Roman prefix.

If we now proceed to classify the Celtic cults of which we
meet remains in Britain, we must note first the absence of
any hierarchy of great gods. Of Esus, Taranis and Teu-
tates, sometimes styled the Celtic Trinity, no sign emerges.1
Instead, a crowd of lesser deities reveals a primitive religion
in much the same rudimentary state as were the religions
of Greece and Rome before the Olympian gods had become
acknowledged as supreme. Some bear names which seem
descriptive of character. Such was Belatucader, ' good at
war ', who was worshipped in the north and coupled with
Mars. Such, too, Maponus, kin somehow to the Welsh
' Mabon ', a child, and habitually yoked with Apollo.
Others belonged to natural features. Verbeia at Ilkley
was patron saint of a stream still called Wharfe ; the
Northumberland Cocidius (often Mars Cocidius) may have
begun as god of the Coquet. Others with less intelligible
names were clearly connected with special spots ; such
were Ancasta at Bittern (near Southampton), Coventina,

1 Teutates occurs once, possibly twice, identified with Mars ; the
others are absent. A Chester altar (C. vii. 168) is said to read IOM
TANARO, but the reading is uncertain ; even if it be right, still
Tanarus is not (as Mr. Holmes thinks, Anct. Britain, p. 279) the same
as Taranis. Whether these three gods were really so important, is
disputed ; see Jullian, Cambridge Medieval History, ii. 464, (for) and
S. Reinach, Mythes et Cultes, i. 205 (against). Mr. Holmes mistakes
the position when he says that ' the devotee who composed his inscrip-
tion to Toutates would not have wittingly ascribed to a mere local god
the qualities of Mars '. That is just what they did, all over Britain
and north Gaul.

70 ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION

whose sacred water bubbled up within the shadow of the
Roman Wall, and Antenociticus, whose shrine now lies be-
neath a suburb of Newcastle. Sul or Sulis, thought to be by
origin the Celtic female Sun and identified with Minerva,
was goddess of the Bath waters. Nodens, kin to or bearing
the same name as an Irish hero, Nuada of the Silver Hand,
was worshipped in west Gloucestershire at Lydney.

These cults and others like them are British. Some Celtic
dedications which occur in the province seem, on the other
hand, to have been brought in from the Celtic mainland.
Mars Leucetius (the lightning god), Mars Rigisamus (most
royal), Mars Olludius, Apollo Grannus, belong across the
Channel ; Grannus, god of healing waters, had a home at
Aachen. A Caerwent altar provides a signal example of
how such import happened. It was set up by a quite
unknown man, one Nonius Romanus, to Mars Lenus or
Ocelus (Marti Leno sive Ocelo). Mars Lenus was a local saint
in the Mosel valley ; Mars Ocelus has been met again in
Caerwent and also in the north. As the Celts of the Mosel
were wont to emigrate freely, it is pretty plain that Nonius
came thence to Caerwent ; there he wished to honour the
gods of his old and his new home, and equated the two in
one phrase.1 Another and much better known example of
imported Celtic worship may be found in the Mother God-
desses, the deae matres. Every one who has looked into
museums in the north of England or along the Rhine will
be familiar with the curious reliefs which show the Three
Mothers seated stiffly side by side, clothed in long robes
and strange headdress and often holding on their laps round
baskets of fruit. Their cult was common in north Italy and
south-eastern Gaul, and on the middle and lower Rhine,
and in Britain. But in Britain it is limited mainly to the
army ; its monuments occur, with comparatively few excep-
tions, within the military area, and the worshippers, so
far as they state their professions, are nearly all soldiers.

1 Epft. Epigr. ix. 1182 and my note. We may ascribe to another
such immigrant the ' colonne an geant ' at Cirencester (Eph. ix. 997).

ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION 71

Probably its birthplace was in the Celtic districts of northern
Italy and south-eastern Gaul, where the earliest dedications
have been found. There, during the early Empire, soldiers
were recruited in large numbers for service on the Rhine
and in Britain, and these soldiers took their native worship
with them. Only, from the Rhine garrisons the cult spread
to German and Gaulish tribes around, finding perhaps some
native Triad of Goddesses with which it amalgamated,
while in Britain it remained, for the most part, confined
within its military habitat.1

III. Foreign cults were also imported into Britain from
non-Celtic sources. But these were confined to the haunts
of soldiers almost more rigidly than the Mother Goddesses.
One group, in its way an interesting group, consists of
Teutonic cults brought over by German soldiers serving in
the northern British frontier garrisons. Sometimes these
Germans accepted the gods whom they found in their new
quarters ; thus, a little band of men who bear German names
and expressly call themselves ' Germani ', is found erect-
ing an altar to Maponus close by the Roman Wall. But
often they kept to their Teutonic deities — Mars Thingsus
and the Two Alaisiagae, Garmangabis, Viradecthis, the
Unseni Fersomari, and many more. One German cult even
spread a little, though not beyond military surroundings.
The small ill-cut altars inscribed deo Hveteri or Vheteri or
Veteri were, as it appears, originally set up to a German god
Veter. Soon the worshippers forgot this and took the dedi-
cation to mean ; to the old god ' ; they even put it into the
plural and paid honour to the di veteres, the Old Gods
generally.2

1 See Ihm, Banner Jahrbucher, Ixxxiii . 1-200, and my paper in Archaeol.
Aeliana, xv. 814. Including the kindred Suleviae, &c., about 60
examples have been found in Britain ; of these the civilian districts
furnish a sixth — Cirencester 4, London 2 or 3, Colchester, Bath, and
Lincoln, 1 each ; at Lincoln, as once or twice elsewhere in Celtic lands,
Matres have been latinized into Parcae.

2 See my note on Eph. Epigr. ix. 1182. The spelling vhe- or hve>
seems decisive of a Teutonic origin. The name is often written with
an i for one or both of the e's,

72 ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION

Far more momentous to the Empire as a whole than
these little Teutonic cults were the immigrant religions
from the east, the worships of Mithras and Dolichenus and
Cybele and Isis and others. They were very powerful.
But in the Atlantic provinces, in Spain and western Gaul
and Britain, their power was limited. They were confined
to special areas, and in particular to military areas. Mith-
raism, the greatest of them all, overran Italy and central
Europe and the Rhone valley which so closely copied Italy.
But further west and north it went only where the troops
went — to the Rhine frontier, to northern Britain, to the
legionary fortresses. From Gibraltar to Fifeshire, barely
half a dozen Mithraic monuments have been recorded which
are not connected with the presence of soldiers. The cult
of the Semitic Dolichenus was equally widespread in Italy
and middle Europe and equally absent from Spain and from
all but the military districts of Gaul and Britain. The
barbaric rites of Cybele, although (perhaps in mitigated
form) they invaded southern Gaul, were abhorred in the
west and above all in Britain.1 If we would find eastern
cults in Britain, we must go to the military posts. At
Corstopitum on the Tyne, just south of the Wall, was a
military depot with some sort of settlement round it, where
all manner of military men collected. There altars were
set up to Astarte (Ashtoreth), to Heracles of Tyre, to Doli-
chenus, to Sol Invictus, to Panthea (Isis ?), as well as to the
British Brigantia and Maponus and the German Veter.
Nothing of the sort occurs in the towns or country-houses of
southern Britain. Here, again, the influence of the Roman
garrisons in Britain was limited to themselves (p. 26). -

1 A. v. Domaszewski, Journal of Roman Studies, i. 54 ; Reseller's
Lex. MythOl. s.v. Meter, 2927. A statue from Chesters (Lapid. Sepl.
149) is often said to represent Cybele, but it is doubtful.

2 Statuettes, figurines and other small objects connected with
Oriental cults occur, of course, far beyond the limits noted in the
text. But, so far as they were not mere curios, they point mainly
to isolated worshippers.

FIG. 25. RELIEF OF DIANA AND HOUND FROM NETTLETON. (p. 73.)
(From a photograph.)

FIG. 26. RELIEF OF MERCURY IN FULL ROMAN STYLE, WITH
A CELTIC GODDESS, FROM GLOUCESTER. (P. 73.)

(From a photograph.)

73

ROMANIZATION IN RELIGION 73

In Britain, therefore, as in other western lands, Roman-
ization in religion meant, within the military area, a sentina
numinum, a kitchen-midden of all sorts of cults heaped up
from all quarters of the Empire. Outside that area it meant
a mixture of Roman and native deities. The proportions
of the mixture no doubt varied, as I have said above
(p. 21). But we find little, if anything, to suggest that
non-Roman elements were consciously preserved as being
non-Roman. Even in the countryside, even in the shrines
with ' Celtic ' plans (p. 36), dedications are uniformly couched
in Latin. At Nettleton, ten miles north-east of Bath,
chance finds seem to have revealed a 4 Celtic ' temple with
two reliefs of Diana. Both were fully Roman in style
(Fig. 25). Though no inscription survives to illuminate the
cult, we need not doubt that here the passers-by — whether
they knew it or not — worshipped Diana of the Romans.
At Lydney, in the sanctuary of the Celtic god Nodens (p. 70),
the temple-plan is Roman, the graffiti are in Latin, and
a representation of Nodens himself (as it seems) might
pass for a rude sketch of Neptune.

In all such cases Roman and native se.em to be harmoni-
ously intertwined, but the Roman is supreme. It was, no
doubt, limited ; the mixture included, as a rule, only a few
of the Roman dominant gods. But it may be worth adding
that, while in northern Gaul a Roman god sometimes
appears along with a distinct Celtic companion, Mercury
(for instance) with Rosmerta, that particular manner of
mixing Roman and native is rarer in Britain. Here the
native element asserted itself less definitely beside the Roman.
Now and then it occurs, as on a relief found in Gloucester l
(Fig. 26), on which Mercury stands beside a goddess who
seems not to be Rosmerta but some other Celtic deity.

1 CataL of Museum formed at Gloucester . . . 1860, p. 8.

CHAPTER VIII

CHRONOLOGY or THE ROMANIZATION

FROM the survey of the evidence whieh illustrates the
Romanization of Britain, I pass to inquire how far history
helps us to trace the chronology of the process. A few facts
and probabilities emerge.

Intercourse between Britain and the Roman world began
when Caesar conquered Gaul. It had lasted nearly a century
when Claudius invaded the island in A.D. 43. During that
age south-eastern Britain learnt much from Rome. Latin
words, as I have said above (p. 29), now appeared on British
coins. Arretine ware found its way, at least in stray pieces,
to London (or Southwark), to Colchester, to Foxton in
Cambridgeshire, to Alchester in Oxfordshire, to Purbeck in
Dorset and some similiar sites, and it was well known and
freely used at Silchester ; the tribal capital of the Atrebates,
which grew into the Romano-British Calleva, must have
undergone some sort of Romanization long before A.D. 43. l
The establishment of a Roman municipium at Verulam
(St. Albans) before A.D. 60, and probably before A.D. 50,2
points the same way. For the status of municipium was
granted in the earlier Empire especially to native provincial
towns wrhich had, so to say, Romanized themselves, with-
out Roman official action or official settlement of Roman
soldiers or citizens, and had thus merited municipal privi-

1 For Southwark and London see Journal of Roman Studies, i. 146 ;
the account of the Southwark piece by Walters, Proc. Cambridgeshire
Antiq. Soc. xii. 107, is incorrect. The total amount of Arretine found
in London is small compared with that from Silchester and suggests
that pre-Roman London (? Southwark) was unimportant. For Foxton
see Babington, Anc. Cambridgeshire, p. 64. For Alchester see my
note Proc. Soc. Antiq. Lond. xxi. 461.

2 It is very much more suitable to Claudius than to Nero, and more
suitable to the earlier than to the later years of Claudius.

^^ A

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION 75

leges. It is quite likely that such Romanization had com-
menced at Verulam before the Claudian conquest and formed
the justification for the early grant.

After the conquest, the lowlands as far west as Exeter and
Shrewsbury, and as far north as the Humber, were subdued
by A. D. 50. Romanization may therefore have marched on
at once. About A. D. 60 certainly, the insurgent Britons
under Boudicca (Boadicea) were able to massacre an enor-
mous number of Romans and ' friendlies ' — a number esti-
mated at the time as 70,000 — and many of the victims must
have been Romanized Britons ; it is not impossible that
this disaster arrested the civilizing process awhile. The real
advance seems to have come a little later, in the Flavian
period (A.D. 70-95). In that age many provinces stepped
forward on the path to Roman culture. In Bntain^towns
like Silchester, Caerwent, Wroxeter,1 now take definite
shape, perhaps with official encouragement ; now, as we
may conjecture, tribal capitals were deliberately converted
into civilized towns, with street-plans find public buildings
of Roman type. Now, too, the spa at Bath developed.2
Now, as Tacitus tells us, Latin began to be spoken, the toga
to be worn, temples, town-halls and private houses to be put
up in Roman fashion. Now also civil judges, legati iuridici,
were appointed, presumably to deal with litigation arising
out of the advancing civilization.3 Tacitus states that
Agricola, as governor in Britain in 78-85, openly encouraged
fliis Romanization, and that his efforts met with great

1 Silchester was plainly laid out all at once, and though it certainly
existed in some form long before A.D. 70, the evidence of coins and
pottery implies that it took a big step forward soon after 70 ; we may
connect that step with the laying out. At Caerwent and Wroxeter,
coins, pottery and brooches suggest that there was little, if any, town
life before the Flavian age and a good deal soon after.

2 At Bath the earliest datable stone belongs to A.D. 76, just before
Agricola came out (Viet. Hist. Somerset, i. 222, 269 ; Eph. Epigr.
ix. 996).

3 A. v. Domaszewski, Tihein. Mus. xlvi. 599 ; CIL. ix. 5533, inscr. of
Salvius Liberalis, iii. 2864-9960, inscr. of lavolenus Prisons, both of
the Flavian period.

.*• d— w— '~*t

76 CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION

_sii£cess_ We know, however, that the movement began before
he reached Britain, and it would seem that he was rather
carrying out the policy of his age than his own. Anyhow,
the policy succeeded. In A. D. 85 it was thought safe to
reduce the garrison of the province by a legion and some
4 auxilia ' — perhaps a quarter or a fifth of its hitherto
strength.1

Of further progress during the second century we have
little exact information. On the one hand we find that
serious risings vexed northern Britain at three points in this
century, about 115-120, again about 155-163,2 and once
more about 175-180, when Caledonia was abandoned, while
the years which ended the second and opened the third
century were full of trouble. All this must have kept even
the civilian area somewhat in disturbance. It was perhaps
at some crisis in this period that the flourishing county-town
of Isurium, a dozen miles north of York, had to shield
itself with stone wall and ditch.3 On the other hand, the
development of the countryside by means of farms and
country-houses must have already begun. We meet early
traces of it in Kent and the south-eastern part of the island
generally, and sometimes outside these limits. Even in
Oxfordshire a site such as Northleigh (p. 41) has yielded
pottery which can hardly be later than the first half of the
second century. Even in the villages excavated by Pitt-
Rivers (p. 55), the use of Samian ware had spread before the
end of the first century.

Peace certainly set in after the opening of the third cen-
tury. It was then, I think, that country-houses and farms

1 Classical Review, 1904, p. 458 ; 1905, p. 58, withdrawal of Batavian
cohorts. The withdrawal of Legio II Adiutrix is well known.

2 Archaeologia Aeliana, xxv. (1904) 142-7 ; Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scotland,
xxxviii. 454.

3 The town-wall of Isurium, partly visible to-day, is built in a fashion
which suggests the second century rather than the late third or the
fourth century, when most of the town- walls in Britain and Gaul
were probably put up. Thus, its masonry shows the ' diamond
brooching ' which also occurs on the Wall of Pius in Scotland and
which must have therefore been in use during the second century.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION 77

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 the south-eastern
region, coins and pottery of the first century are infrequent,
and many sites of rural dwellings 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, it
seems, 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 pros-
perous and civilized region, where Latin speech and culture
might be expected to prevail widely.

No golden age lasts long. In 343 Constans had to cross
the Channel and repel the Picts and other assailants.5 After
360 such aid was more often and more urgently required.

1 Mommsen, Rom. Gesch., v. 97, 106, and Ausonius, passim.

2 Eumenius, Paneg. Constantio Caesari, 21 civitas Aeduorum . . .
plurimos quibus illae provincial (Britain) redundabant accepit artifices,
ct mine exstructione veterum domorum et refectione operum publicormn
el templorum instauratione consurgit.

3 Ammianus, xviii. 2, 3 annona a Brittaniis sueta transferri ; Zosimus,
iii. 5.

4 Edict. Diocl. xix. 30. 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).

6 Ammianus, xx. 1. The expedition was important enough to be
recorded on coins which show Constans on a galley, recrossing the
Channel after his victory (Cohen, 9-13, &c.). On the history of the
whole period for Britain see Cambridge Medieval History, i. 378.

78 CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION

Significantly enough, the lists of coins found in some country-
houses close about 350-60, while other houses remained occu-
pied 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.1 In the crisis of 367-8 the ravages seem to have
spread over almost all the lowlands.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

1 See, for example, the coin-finds of the country -houses at Thruxton,
Abbots Ann, Clanville, Holbury, Carisbrooke, &c., in Hampshire
(Viet. Hist. Hants, i. 294 foil.). The Croydon hoard, deposited about
A. D. 351 (Numismatic Chronicle, 1905, p. 37) may be due to the same
cause.

2 Ammian, xxvii. 8. 6.

3 It is hard to believe him Irish (Rhys, 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 denote the former.

4 Mommsen, Rom. Gesch., v. 177. Zosimus, vi. 5 (A.D. 408), in a
puzzling passage describes Britain as revolting from Rome when
Constantine III was tyrant (A.D. 407-11). It is generally assumed
that when Constantine tailed 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, in the middle of a chapter about Italy, that Honorius wrote to
Britain, bidding the provincials defend themselves, so that the act of
408 cannot have been final. Possibly, however, as the context suggests

CONCLUSIONS 79

Sucli is, in brief, the positive evidence, archaeological,
linguistic, and historical, which illustrates the Romaniza-
tion 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
town-life and culture. Secondly, this Romanization was
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 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 must have lingered on, like Erse or Manx to-day, as
a rival to the more fashionable Latin. How far this hap-
pened 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. 24, note 3).
Here the Britons must have remained Celtic, or at least
capable of a reversion to the Celtic tradition.

and as Gothofredus and others have thought, the name ' Britain ' is
here a copyist's mistake for ' Bruttii '. 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.

CHAPTER IX

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 ante-
cedents. The Romanization, we find, held its own for
a while after 400. 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 forces,
a Celtic revival and an English invasion.

I. 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 migra-

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. 45).

CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE 81

tion are unknown, and the faint traces which survive of it
are 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 Deisi 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 num-
bered 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 Car-
marthen (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 per-
haps 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

1 Rhys, Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc., Kerry Meeting, 1891, and Celtic
Britain (ed. 3, 1904, p. 247), minimizes the invasions of southern
Britain (Cornwall and Wales). Bury (Life of St. Patrick, p. 288)
emphasizes them ; see also Zimmer, Nennius Vindicatus, pp. 84 foil.,
and Kuno Meyer, Cymmrodorioti Transactions, 1895-6, pp. 55 foil.
The decision of the question seems to depend upon whether we should
regard the Goidelic elements 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.

1751 F

82

THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN

traditional chronology — about A. D, 405 on the British coast

and perhaps in the Channel itself.

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 (Fig. 27), which
was discovered at Sil-
chester in the excava-
tions of 1893.1 The
circumstances of the
discovery show that this
pillar belongs to the very
latest period in the his-
tory of Calleva. Its in-
scription is Goidelic :
that is, it does not be-
long to the ordinary
Callevan population,
which was presumably
Brythonic. It may be
best explained as the
work of some western
Celt who reached Sil-
chester before its British
citizens abandoned it.
We do not know the
date of that abandon-
ment, though we may

conjecturally put it before, and probably a great many years

before, A. D. 500. In any case, an Ogam monument had

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.

FIG. 27. OGAM INSCRIPTION
FROM SILCHESTER.

THE LATER EMPIRE 83

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.

II. But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found
in another fact — the destruction of the Romanized part of
Britain by the invading Saxons. War, and especially defen-
sive war against invaders, must always weaken the higher
forms of any country's civilization. Here the assailants
were cruel and powerful, and the country itself was some-
what 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.
Sixty or seventy years later the raiders, whether English
seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland,
devastated the coasts and even the midlands of the
province.1 When, in the fifth century, 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 extin-
guished. Not a single one remained an inhabited town.

1 About A.D. 405 Patrick was carried oft from Banna vem Taberniae.
If this represents the Romano-British village on Watling Street called
Bannaventa, near Whilton in Northants (Viet. Hist. Northants, i. 186),
the raids must have covered all the midlands : see Engl. Hist. Review,
1895, p. 711 ; hence Zimmer, Realenc. fur protestantische Theol. x.
(1901), Art. ' Keltische Kirche ' ; Bury, Life of St. Patrick, p. 322. There
are, however, many^ uncertainties surrounding this question.

2 Engl. Hist. Review, xix. 625 ; Viet. Hist. Hampshire, i. 371-2 ;
Viet. Hist. Shropshire, i. 217.

F 2

84 THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN

Destruction fell even on Canterbury, where the legends tell
of intercourse between Briton and 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 not more or less forbid us to guess at
a continuing Romano-British life.

The same destruction came also on the population.
During the long series of disasters, many of the Romanized
inhabitants of the lowlands 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.

It is this Celtic revival which can best explain the history
of Britannia minor, Brittany across the seas in the western

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 atmosphere is Celtic, and his rhetoric contains no
reference to a flourishing civilization. We may conclude that the
Romanized part of Britain had been lost by his time, or that, if some
of it was still British, long war had destroyed its civilization Unfor-
tunately, we cannot trust the traditional English chronology of the
period. For the date of Gildas, see 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.

THE LATER EMPIRE 85

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 date not precisely known, perhaps in the middle of the
third century, it was in open rebellion, and the commander
of the Sixth Legion, which was stationed 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 and Jullian think, one of the least Romanized
corners of Gaul ; 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 immigrants. 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 the fifth-

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. legg. Ger-
manicianar. et Brittanicin. 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.

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 Cor-
stopitum (Corbridge on Tyne). But the latter, always to some extent
a military site, can hardly have sent out ordinary emigre's, while the
former has hardly an historical existence at all, and may be an ancient
error for dvitas Coriosolitum (C. xiii (1), p. 491).

3 Freeman (Western Europe in the Fifth Century, p. 164) suggested

86 THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN

century movement of Britons into Gaul, with the Celtic
revival and with the same causes that produced, for instance,
the Scotic invasion of Caledonia.

This destruction of Romano-British life produced a result
which would be difficult to explain if we could not assign it
to this cause. There is an 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 or four
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

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) thought 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 a 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 islands seems to provide a better setting
for Riotamus.

If Professor Bury is right (Life of St. 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 (Nemrius
Vind., p. 85) rejects the tale. But it fits in well with the Celtic revival.

1 Mommsen, Preface to Gildas (Mon. Germ. Hist.), pp. 9-10. Gildas
is, however, more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to allow. Such
a phrase as ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur implies a con-
sciousness of contrast between Briton and Roman. Freeman (Western
Europe, p. 155) puts the case too strongly the other way.

THE LATER EMPIRE 87

details of the persecution of Diocletian and of the career of
Magnus Maximus.1 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 a coming of the English about
450, and of a reason why they came. But his know-
ledge of anything previous to that event was plainly most
imperfect.

The Historia Brittonum, compiled a century or two later,
preserves even less memory of things Roman. There is
some hint of a vetus traditio seniorwn. 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.2 We have got here a very long way
beyond Gildas. He, after all, knew something of Maximus
and understood (however dimly) the relation of Britain to
Rome. The ; Historia ' goes altogether astray on both
points. 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 —

1 Magnus Maximus, as the opponent of Theodosius, seems to have
been damned by the Church writers. Compare the phrases of Orosius.
vii. 35 (Theodosius) posuil in Deo spem suam seseque adversus Maximum
tyrannum sola fide maior proripuit and ineffabili iudicio Dei and Theo-
dosius victoriam Deo procurante suscepit.

2 The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is obvious
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
history.

88 CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE

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.1
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.2

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 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.

1 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 dis-
proves this idea. Had he used a genuinely ancient authority, he would
have (as in other cases) employed the Roman name. Another explana-
tion 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.

2 The English mediaeval chronicles have sometimes been thought
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
Hengwrt and All Souls MSS. ; the truth is obscured in the Rolls Series
text, as I have pointed out, Athenaeum, April 6, 1901). 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 pro.
vinces of fourth-century Britain — otherwise unknown throughout the
Middle Ages (Archaeol. Oxoniensis, 1894, p. 224).

INDEX

Aldborough (Isurium Brigantum), 24, 39, 61 note, 76.
Arretine ware, 19 ; in Britain, 74.
Avotis on moulds of Gaulish potters, 31.

Bannavem Taberniae and St. Patrick, 83.
Bath, 61, 75 ; the Bath Gorgon, 53.
Brislington (near Bristol), house at, 39.
Brittany, British migration to, 84.

Caerwent (Venta Silurum), 24, 42, 70 ; a cantonal capital, 60.
Canterbury, derivation of name, 60 ; deserted after the Roman

period, 84.

Cantonal system in Gaul, 20 ; in Britain, 58 foil.
Carausius, birthplace, 78.
Castor ware, 49 foil.
Celtic art, 48, 80 note.

Celtic languages used in Gaul and Britain, 18, 31 foil.
Celtic type of temples, 37 ; of houses, 38 foil.
Christianity, its attitude to native languages, 19.
Clanville, house at, 39.
Cloth made in Britain, 77.
Coloni (rural), in Britain, 65.
Coloniae (municipalities), 15 ; in Britain, 57.
Corbridge, 72, 85 ; the Corbridge Lion, 53.
Corn exported from Britain to the Continent, 77.
Cornwall, Roman remains in, 24 note.

Deae matres, 70.

Demetrius of Tarsus at York, 34.

Dessi (Deisi) migrate from Ireland to Wales, 81.

Deus Veter, di veteres, perhaps Teutonic deities, 71.

Devonshire, Roman remains in, 24 note.

Din Lligwy (Anglesea), village at, 46.

Dragon brooches, 52.

Emigration from Italy into the provinces, 16.
Frilford (Berks), house at, 39, 47.

Gaulish kingdom of A.D. 258-73, 17.

Gaulish language used under the Empire, 18.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 87.

Gildas, 84, 86.

Glastonbury, pre -Roman lake-village near, 55.

Gloucester, colonia, municipal tiles, 57, 63 ; sculpture of Mcrcurv

found at, 73.

Goidelic elements in Britain, 81, 82.
Gorgon at Bath, 53.

'

90 INDEX

Henry of Huntingdon, Hengwrt and All Souls MSS., 88 note.
Hesione and Hercules, 51.
Historia Brittonum, 87.

Houses in Roman Britain, their varieties, their relation to houses in
north Gaul, Italy, &c., 37 foil.

Icinos, tribe-name perhaps used of chief town, 60.
Ickleton (Cambridgeshire), graffito at, 33.
Imperial domains in Britain, 64, 65.

Jerome (St.), cited, 18.
Kent, derivation of name, 35.

Late Celtic art, 48.

Latin used in the provinces, 18 ; in Britain, 29.

Leicester, graffito from, 32.

Leugae in Gaul, 17.

Lincoln, 57.

London —

Pre-Rornan inhabitation, 74, note.

Size, 62.

Constitution of town, 62.

Latin spoken in, 32.

Deserted after the Roman period, 84.

Magnus Maximus, fate of his army, 86 note.

Mars in Roman provincial religion, 69.

Mars Lenus sive Ocelus, 70.

Mercury in Roman provincial religion, 69.

Mercury and Rosmerta, 21, 73.

Mithraism, distribution in western Europe and Britain, 72.

Mosaic floors in Roman Britain, 44.

Nettleton (on the Fosse), shrine of Diana, 73.
New Forest ware, 48.
Nodens, Celtic deity of Lydney, 70, 73.
Northleigh (Oxon), house at, 41, 76.

Ogam at Silchester, 82.

Oriental worships in Britain, 72.

Orpheus on mosaic floors, not Christian, 44.

Pergamene style in the Roman provinces, 54 note.

Pitt-Rivers, excavations by, 45, 55.

Plaxtol (Kent), inscribed tiles at, 33.

Pompeian houses compared with British, 40, 42 note.

Punic language, used in Roman Africa, 18.

Ravenna Geographer, 60.
Religion, 21 ; in Britain, 68.
Riotamus, British chief in Gaul, 85.

Samian ware, 19, 54.

Seebohm's theory of the suffix ' ham ', 65 note.

Silchester —

Name, 61, 88 note.

Pre-Roman, 74.

INDEX 91

Silchester —

Imperial domains under Nero at, 65.

Development as Romano-British town, 75 note.

Houses in, 42, 64.

Latin used in, inscribed tiles, 29 foil.

Temples of, 37.

Town-planning of, 43, 64.

Dyeing works in, 77 note.

Abandoned, 83.

Taiiarus, supposed Celtic god, 69.
Temples in Britain, 36, 62, 73.
Town-planning in Roman Britain, 64.
Towns of Roman Britain, 57-65.

Veter (Vheter), di vetercs, 71.

Vergil, tags from, known at Silchester, 30.

Verulamium, municipium, perhaps pre-Roman town, 57, 74.

Villages in Roman Britain, 45, 55.

Vinogradoff, 35, 66.

Vortigern and Hengist, 87.

Wales, Roman, 24, 46, 81.
Warwickshire, few Roman remains in, 27.
Wroxeter (Virocomum Cornoviorwn), 24, 37, 61.

York, colonia and fortress, 26, 57.

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