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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 The 
 
 Eomanizsatioii of Eoman ^itain 
 
 F, Jf Haverfield 
 
 Fellow bf the Academy: 
 
 IJFH-om the Proceedings of the British Academy, FolII} 
 
 London 
 
 Publish^ for the British Academy 
 
 By Hetoy Frowde, Oxford University Press Warehouse 
 
 Axnen Corner, E.C. 
 
 Price Two ShUlmgs aiid Sixpence nSst 
 
THE RQMANIZATION OF ROMAN 
 BRITAIN 
 
 By F. J. IjLAVERFIELD 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 Read Nov, 29, 1905. 
 
 HisToniANs rarely praise the Roman Empire. They regard it as 
 a period of death and despotism, from which political freedom and 
 creative genius and the energies of the speculative intellect were all 
 alike excluded. There is, unquestionably, much truth in this judgement. 
 Yet perhaps there is another side to be considered. 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 un- 
 travelled region such as revealed itself to our forefathers at the 
 Renaissance or to our fathers fifty years ago. No new continent then 
 rose up beyond the western seas. No forgotten literature suddenly 
 flashed out its long-lost splendours. No vast discoveries of science 
 transformed the universe and the interpretation of it. The inventive 
 freshness and intellectual confidence that are bom of such things 
 were denied to the Empire. Its temperament was neither artistic, 
 nor literary, nor scientific. It was merely practical. 
 
 Yet if practical, it was not therefore uncreative. In its own 
 sphere of everyday life, it was an epoch of growth in many directions. 
 Even the arts moved forward. Sculptiu-e was enriched by a new and 
 nobler style of portraiture. The scope of architecture was widened 
 by the engineering genius which reared the aqueduct of Segovia and 
 the Basilica of Maxentius ^. But these are only practical expansions 
 of arts that are in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the 
 imperial age must be sought in its provincial administration — in 
 the organization of the frontier defences which repulsed the barbarian, 
 and in the development of the provinces within those defences. The 
 first of these achievements was but for a time. In the end the 
 
 > Franz WickhofF, Wiener Genesis, p. 10 ; Riegl, Stil/ragen, p. 272. 
 
 M 
 
2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Roman legionary went down before the Gothic horseman. But 
 before he fell he had done his work. In the lands that he had 
 sheltered, Roman civilization had taken firm root. The growth of 
 Roman speech and manners, the extension of the political franchise, 
 the establishment of city hfe, the assimilation of the provincial 
 populations in an orderly and coherent civilization, had been ac- 
 complished. That was the work of the Empire. As the importance 
 of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large 
 part of the world became Roman. 
 
 This Romanization has its limits and its characteristics. First, in 
 respect of place. Alike in the further east, where (as in Egypt) 
 mankind was non-European, and in the nearer east, where a Greek 
 civilization reigned, the effect of Romanization was inevitably partial. 
 A few Italian oases were created here and there in Asia Minor and in 
 Syria. But all of them, save one or two, perished like exotic plants ^. 
 The Romanization of these lands was political. Their inhabitants 
 learnt to call and to consider themselves Romans. But they did not 
 adopt the Roman language or Roman civilization. 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 or Asiatics, 
 who seem sundered for ever from their conquerors by a broad physical 
 distinction. We know too the rule of civilized white men over 
 civilized white men — of Russian (for example) over Pole, where the 
 individualities of two similarly civilized races clash in undying conflict. 
 The Roman conquest of western Europe resembled neither of these. 
 Celt, Iberian, German, lUyrian were marked off from Italian by no 
 broad distinction of race and colour, such as that which marked off 
 Egyptian from Italian, or that which now divides Englishman from 
 Indian or Frenchman from Algerian Arab. They were marked off, 
 further, by no ancient culture, such as that which had existed for 
 centuries round the Aegean. It was possible, it was easy, to 
 Romanize these western peoples. 
 
 Even their geographical position helped, though somewhat in- 
 
 * See Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, p. 1473 and Kubitschek, Festheft 
 Bormann (Wiener Studien, xxiv. 2), pp. 340-349. One reason for the loss of 
 Roman culture is indicated by inscriptions like C. iii. 6800, in which a veteran 
 of the Legio xii Fulminata, M. Antonius Longus, commemorates a wife with the 
 purely native name of Ba. This is perhaps to he distinguished from the 
 marriages of soldiers on service with peregrinae, from which the well-known 
 class of castrenses sprang {Ephemeris Epigr., v. 14). 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 3 
 
 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 influenced the whole history of the Empire. In 
 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 
 a land that, geographically speaking, looks westward. But it was 
 drawn surely, if slowly, to the east. Throughout the first three 
 centuries of our era, we can trace an eastward drift — of troops, of 
 officials, of government machinery — till finally the capital itself is no 
 longer Rome but Byzantium. All the while, in the undisturbed 
 security of the west, Romanization proceeded steadily. 
 
 The advance of this Romanization followed manifold lines. In 
 various ways the Roman government gave direct encouragement. 
 It increased the Roman or Romanized population of the provinces 
 by establishing time-expired soldiers — men who spoke Latin and 
 were citizens of Rome* — in provincial municipalities. It allured 
 provincials themselves to adopt Roman civilization by granting the 
 franchise and other privileges to those who conformed. Neither step 
 need be ascribed to any idealism on the part of the rulers. Coloniae 
 were centres of repression as well as of culture. Civilized men were 
 more easily ruled than savages ^. But the result was in any case the 
 same. 
 
 No less important results followed from unofficial causes. The 
 legionary fortresses collected settlers — traders, women, veterans — 
 under the shelter of their ramparts, and their canahae or ' ba^aars,^ to 
 use an Anglo-Indian term, formed centres of Roman speech and life, 
 and often developed into cities. Italians, especially of the upper- 
 middle class, merchants and others, emigrated freely and formed 
 little Roman settlements, often in districts where no troops were 
 
 ' English writers sometimes adduce the proviucial origins of the soldiers 
 aa proofs that they were unromanized. But the conclusion is unjustifiable. 
 The legionaries were throughout recruited from places which were adequately 
 romaaized. The auxiliaries, though recruited from less civilized districts, and 
 though to some extent tribally organized in the early Empire, were denationalized 
 after a. d. 70, and non-Roman elements do not begin to recur in the army till 
 much later. Even Tiberius militem Oraece testimonium interrogatum nisi Latine 
 retpondere vetuit (Suet. Tib. 71). 
 
 * Tac. Agr. 21 ut homines dispersi ae rudes, eoque in bella faciles, quieti et otio 
 per voluptates adsuescerent, hortari privatim adiuvare publiee ut templa fora domos 
 exstruerent. . . . Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset, 
 Tacitus frequently emphasizes this point. 
 
4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 stationed ^. Chances opened at Rome for able provincials who became 
 Romanized. Above all, the definite and coherent civilization of 
 Italy took hold of uncivilized but intelligent men, while the tolerance 
 of Rome, which coerced no one into conformity, made its culture 
 the more attractive because it was the less inevitable. 
 
 This process of Romanization is hard to follow in detail, since 
 datable evidence is scanty. In general, however, the instances of 
 really native fashions or speech which are recorded from this or that 
 province, belong to the early Empire. To that age we must assign 
 the Celtic, Iberian, and Punic inscriptions which we find occa- 
 sionally in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, and the native titles like 
 vergobret or suffete, and the retention of native personal names and 
 of that class of Latin nomina, like Lovessius, which are formed out 
 of native names. In the later Empire such things are rare. A few 
 examples naturally meet us here and there. Punic-speaking clergy, 
 it appears, were needed in some of the remoter villages of fourth- 
 century Africa. But these are survivals, noted at the time as 
 exceptional, and explained by their remoteness from the great 
 centres of civilization. In most districts the Latin tongue obviously 
 prevailed. In material culture the Romanization advanced no less 
 quickly. One uniform fashion spread from Italy throughout central 
 and western Europe, driving out native art and substituting a con- 
 ventionalized copy of Italian art, which is characterized alike by 
 its technical finish and neatness, and by its lack of originality and 
 its servile 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. Politi- 
 cally, again, the provincial soon realized himself to be a Roman. If 
 he felt sometimes the claims of his province and raised a cry that 
 sounds like ' Africa for the Africans,' he acted on a geographical, not 
 on any native or national idea. He was demanding individual life 
 for a Roman section of the Empire. He was anticipating, perhaps, 
 the birth of new nations out of the Romanized populations. He 
 was not attempting to recall the old pre-Roman system. Similarly, 
 if his art or architecture embodies native fashions or displays a local 
 style, if special types of houses or of tombstones or sculpture occur in 
 
 ' Schulten, de conventibus civium Romanormn ; Kornemann, de civibus Rom. 
 in prov. imperii consiHentibus. A good example is indicated by an inscription of 
 Avaricum Biturigum (Bourges) in Aquitania (C. xiii (1) 1, no. 1194) pro salute 
 Caesarum et p. R., Minervae et divae Drusillae sacrum in perpetuum, C. Agileius 
 Primus vi vir Aug. c{urator) ciivium) R{omanorum), d. s. p. d. (a. n. 38-40). The 
 fact that a freedman was ' curator ' does not imply that the body of Roman 
 citizens at Bourges were not freeborn. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 5 
 
 special districts, that does not mar the result. These are not efforts 
 to regain an earlier native life. They are not the enemies of Roman 
 culture, but its children — sometimes, indeed, its adopted children — 
 and signify the commencement of new Roman styles of fashions. 
 
 But while it is true generally that Romanization spread rapidly, 
 we must admit great differences between different districts. Some 
 grew Romanized soon and thoroughly, others slowly and imperfectly. 
 Gallia Comata, that is, Gaul north and west of the Cevennes, con- 
 trasted sharply in this respect with Narbonensis, the province of 
 the Mediterranean coast and the Rhone valley. This latter, even in 
 the first century a.d., had become lialia verius quam provincia. 
 The other lagged behind. In the Pyreneean valleys Basque must 
 have been spoken throughout the Roman period. Among the 
 Treveri near the easfem frontier, Celtic could be heard in the fourth 
 century — presumably in the great woodlands that overhang the 
 Mosel valley. Yet even in northern Gaul Romanization strode 
 forward. The Gaulish monarchy of a. d. 258-273 shows us the position 
 north of the Cevennes just after the middle of the third century. In 
 it Roman and native elements were mixed. Its emperors were called 
 not only Latinius Postumus but also Piavonius and Esuvius Tetricus. 
 Its coins were inscribed not only 'Romae Aeternae,' but also 
 ' Herculi Deusoniensi ' and ' Herculi Magusano.' It not only claimed 
 independence of Rome or perhaps equality with it, but it aspired to be 
 the Empire. It had its own senate, copied from that of Rome, its tri- 
 hunicia potestas conferred on its ruler and its iitXeprinceps iuventutis for 
 the heir apparent. At that date it was still possible for a Gaulish ruler 
 to bear a Gaulish name and to appeal to some sort of native memories. 
 But the appeal was made without any sense that it was incompatible 
 with a general acceptance of Roman fashions, language, and constitu- 
 tion. Postumus, if he had had the chance, would have made 
 himself Emperor of Rome. Though the native element in Gaul 
 had not died out of mind, at any rate its opposition to the Roman 
 had become forgotten. It had become little more than a picturesque 
 and interesting contrast to the all-absorbing Roman element. A 
 hundred and thirty years later it had almost wholly vanished '- 
 
 ' Not impossibly, however^ the ultimate extinction of Celtic in the north-east 
 of Gaul may be due to the inrush of Teutons and the Teutonic language. 
 Mommsen {Rom. Gesch. v. 92) ascribes it rather to the influence of Christianity 
 ' welche in Gallien nicht, wie in Syrien uud Aegypten, die von der Regierung 
 bei Seite geschobeue Landessprache aufnahm, sonderndas Evaugelium lateinisch 
 verkiindigte.' But the Latin Church seems to have been ready to use the 
 native idioms where necessary (p. 4). Its later tendency to insist on Latin arose 
 rather from the wide diffusion of Latin through the western provinces. 
 
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Such is the historical situation to which we must adjust our views 
 of any single province in the western Empire. Two main conclusions 
 may here be emphasized. First, Romanization in general extinguished 
 the distinction between Roman and provincial, alike in politics, 
 in material culture and in language. Secondly, it did not everywhere 
 and at once destroy all traces of tribal or national sentiments or 
 fashions. These remained, &t least for a while and in a few districts, 
 not so much in active opposition as in latent persistence, capable 
 of resurrection under the proper conditions. In such cases the 
 provincial had become a Roman. But he could still undergo an 
 atavistic reversion to the ancient ways of his forefathers. 
 
 One western province seems to form an exception to the general 
 rule. In Britain, as it is described by the majority of English 
 writers, we have a province in which Roman and native were as 
 distinct as modern Englishmen and Indian, and ' the departure _ of 
 the Romans' in the fifth century left the Britons almost as Celtic 
 as tTieir coming had found them. The adoption of this view may be 
 set down, I think, to various reasons which have, in themselves, little 
 to do with the subject. The older archaeologists, familiar with the 
 early wars narrated by Caesar and Tacitus, pictured the whole history 
 of the island as consisting of such struggles. Later writers have 
 been influenced by the analogies of English rule in India. Still 
 more recently, the revival of Welsh national sentiment has inspired 
 a hope, which has become a belief, that the Roman conquest was 
 an episode, after which an unaltered Celticism resumed its interrupted 
 supremacy. These considerations have, plainly enough, very little 
 value as history, and the view which is based on them seems to 
 me mistaken. As I have already pointed out, it is not the view 
 which is suggested by a consideration of the general character of 
 the western provinces. Nor do I think that it is the view which 
 agrees best with the special evidence which we possess in respect 
 of Britain, In the following paragraphs I propose to examine 
 this evidence. I shall adopt an archaeological rather than a legal 
 or a philological standpoint. The legal and philological arguments 
 have often been put forward. But the legal arguments are entirely 
 a priori, and they have led different scholars to very different con- 
 clusions. The philological arguments are no less beset with difficulties. 
 Both the facts and their significance are obscure, and the inquiry 
 into them has hitherto yielded little beyond confident and yet wholly 
 contradictory assertions and theories which are not susceptible of 
 proof. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, is definite and 
 consistent, and perhaps deserves fuller notice than it has yet received. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 7 
 
 I need not here insert a sketch of Roman Britain. But I may 
 Cfdl attention to three features which are not seldom overlooked. 
 
 X, 
 
 "siaurium ^^ 
 
 E 
 
 YVe0URACUM LtCVI.ndCSI 
 
 2ri 
 
 LEG XX // ^^- ""/^ 
 
 ^jh^- 
 
 rv^^W"^ 
 
 -^^4 
 
 
 r-^ 
 
 ^^^ v^^''^^ / '^'^^c^ 
 
 r-K\^ 
 
 / j[<lS(jWinch / -^ 
 
 A > L^ 
 
 A ^V( S^s^'^'i^iJi^-a "7^-^^ 
 
 .PT 
 
 
 
 Fig. 1. The civil and militaby districts op Britain. 
 
 In the first place, it is necessary to distinguish the two halves of the 
 province, the one the northern and western uplands occupied only 
 
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 by troops, and the other the eastern and southern lowlands which 
 contained nothing but purely civilian life ^. The two are marked 
 off, not in law but in practical fact, almost as fully as if one had 
 been domi and the other militiae. We shall not seek for traces of 
 Romanization in the military area. There neither towns existed nor 
 villas. Northwards, no town or country house has been found beyond 
 the neighbourhood of Aldborough (Isurium), some fifteen miles north- 
 west of York. Westwards, on the Welsh frontier, the most advanced 
 town was at Wroxeter ( Viroconium), near Shrewsbury, and the furthest 
 country house was an isolated dwelling at Llantwit, in Glamorgan. 
 In the south-west, the last house was near Lyme Regis, the last town 
 at Exeter. These are the limits of the Romanized area. Outside 
 of them, the population cannot have acquired much Roman character, 
 nor can it — except perhaps in Devon and Cornwall — ^have been 
 numerous enough to form more than a subsidiary factor in our 
 problem^. But within these limits were towns and villages and 
 country houses and farms, a large population and a developed and 
 orderly life. 
 
 Secondly, Romano-British life was on a small scale. It was, 
 I think, normal in quality and indeed not very dissimilar from that 
 of many parts of Gaul. But it was in any case defective in quantity. 
 We find towns in Britain, as elsewhere, and farms or country houses. 
 But the towns are small and somewhat few, and the country houses 
 indicate comfort more often than wealth. The costlier objects of 
 ordinary use, fine mosaics, precious glass, gold and silver ornaments, 
 occur comparatively seldom*. We have before us a civilization which, 
 
 ' For further details see the Victoria County Histories of Northamptonshire, i. 
 169, and Derbyshire, i. 191. To save frequent references to the same works, 
 I may say here that much of the evidence for the following paragraphs is 
 to be found in my" articles on Romano-British remains printed in the volumes 
 of this History. I am indebted to its publishers for leave to reproduce several 
 illustrations from its pages. For many others I may refer my readers to the 
 History itself. 
 
 " The Roman remains discovered west of Exeter are few and mostly later than 
 A. D. 260. No town or country house or farm or stretch of roadway has ever 
 been found here. The list includes only an early settlement on Plymouth 
 harbour, another near Bodmin, of small size, and a third, equally small and of 
 uncertain date, on Padstow harbour ; some scanty vestiges of tin mining, prin- 
 cipally late ; two milestones (if milestones they be) of the early fourth century, 
 the one at Tintagel church and the other near St. Hilary ; and some scattered 
 hoards and isolated bits. Portions of the country were plainly inhabited, but the 
 inhabitants did not learn Roman ways, lilce those who lived east of the Exe. 
 Even tin mining was not pursued very actively till a comparatively late period. 
 
 ' See my remarks in Traill's Social England (illustrated edition, 1901), i. 141- 
 161. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 9 
 
 like a man whose constitution is sound rather than strong, might 
 perish quickly before a violent shock. 
 
 And lastly, the distribution of civilian life, even in the lowlands, 
 was singularly uneven. It is not merely that some districts were the 
 special homes of wealthier residents. We have also to conceive 
 of some parts as densely peopled and of some as kardly inhabited. 
 Portions of Kent, Sussex, and Somerset are set thick with country houses 
 and similar vestiges of Romano-British life. But other portions of the 
 same counties, southern Kent, northern Sussex, western Somerset, 
 show very few traces of any settled life at all. The midland plain, 
 and in particular Warwickshire ■', seems to have been the largest of 
 these ' thin spots.' Here, among great woodlands and on damp and 
 chilly clay, there dwelt not merely few civilized Roman-Britons, but 
 few occupants of any^ort. 
 
 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 4heir 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 quite 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 inscrip- 
 tion occurs, I believe, on any monument of the Roman period in 
 Britain, neither cut on stone nor scratched on tile or potsherd, and 
 this fact is the more noteworthy because Celtic inscriptions are not at 
 all unknown in Gaul. On the other hand, Roman inscriptions occur 
 freely in Britain. They are less common than in many other 
 provinces, and they abound most in the military region. But they 
 appear also in towns and country houses, and some of the instances 
 are significant. 
 
 The best town site that we can examine is Calleva or Silchester, 
 ten miles south of Reading, which has been excavated with much 
 care and thoroughness. Here a few fairly complete inscriptions on 
 stone have been discovered, and many fragments of others, which 
 prove that the public language of the town was Latin 2. The 
 
 ' Victoria Hist, of Warwickshire, i. 228. 
 
 ' For these and for the following ^raj^ij see my account in the Victoria History 
 of Hampshire, i. 275, 280-284. For the ' Clementinus ' tile (discovered since) 
 see Archaeologin, Iviii. 30. It should be noted that Silchester lies in a stoneless 
 country^ so that stone inscriptions would naturally he few and would easily be 
 used up for later building. Moreover, its cemeteries have not yet been 
 explored, and only one tombstone has come accidentally to light. 
 
10 PROCEEDINGS QF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 speech of ordinary conversation is equally well attested by smaller 
 inscribed objects, and the evidence is remarkable, since it plainly 
 refers to the lower class of Callevans, When a weary brick-maker 
 scrawls satis with his finger on a tile, or some prouder spirit writes 
 CLEMENTiNvs FECIT TVBVM (Clementinus made this box-tile), when a 
 bit of Samian is marked fve — presumably as a warning from the 
 servants of one house to those of the next — or a rude brick shows 
 the word pvellam — probably part of an amatory sentence, otherwise 
 lost — we may be sure that the lower classes of Calleva used Latin alike 
 at their work and in their more frivolous moments (figs. 2, 3, 4). 
 
 It has been asked, indeed, how a British workman could have learnt 
 Latin, and it has been suggested that these graffiti were written by 
 immigrant Italians, working as labourers or servants in Calleva. The 
 question does not touch the real issue. Our general survey of the 
 western provinces indicated that Romanization occurred freely in 
 them, and, if it came about in Britain, the workman would learn 
 Latin as a matter of course with the rest of the country. The proper 
 question to be asked is whether evidence exists to show that Britain 
 was Romanized, and Latin words scratched by servants on tiles or 
 potsherds seem to supply some of that evidence. The suggestion 
 that these servants were Italians does not seem probable. Italians 
 certainly emigrated to the provinces in considerable numbers, just as 
 Italians emigrate to-day. But the ancient emigrants were not 
 labourers, as they are to-day. They were traders or dealers in land, or 
 money-lenders or other ' well-to-do ' persons. The labourers and 
 servants of Calleva must be sought among the native population, 
 and the graffiti testify that this population wrote Latin. 
 
 It is a further question whether, besides writing Latin, the Callevan 
 servants and workmen may not" also have spoken Celtic. Here direct 
 evidence fails. In the nature of things, we cannot hope for proof 
 of the negative proposition that Celtic was not spoken in Silchester. 
 But all probabilities suggest that it was, at any rate, spoken very 
 little. In the ten years excavation of the site, no Celtic inscription 
 has emerged. Instead, we have proof, that the lower classes wrote 
 Latin for all sorts of purposes. Had they known Celtic well, it is 
 hardly credible that they should not have sometimes written in that 
 language as the Gauls did across the Channel. A Gaulish potter 
 of Roman date could scrawl his name and record, Sacrillos avot, 
 ' Sacrillus made this,' on the outside of a mould for casting little 
 earthenware figurines. No such scrawl has ever been found in 
 Britain^. The Gauls, again, could invent a special letter B 
 1 Tudot, Bulletin monwmmtaJ, xxiii. (1857) 367. One example is Sacrillos avot 
 
Fig. 2 
 
 Fig. 3 
 
 (S-^f/^'i 
 
 Fig. 4: 
 
 Graffiti from Silchester 
 
 Fig. 2. puellam. Fig. 3. clementinus fecit tl-bum 
 
 Fig. 4. pertacus perfidus oampester luciuanus campanus 
 
 CONTICUERE OMNES (pROBABLY A WRITING LESSOn) 
 
 To /ace p. lo] 
 
THE ROMANIZATION €F ROMAN BRITAIN 11 
 
 to denote a special Celtic sound and keep it in Roman times. No 
 such letter was used in Roman Britain. Mr. Hogarth has, indeed, 
 cited to me the case of towns like Lystra in Asia Minor, where, 
 as St. Paul found, the inhabitants spoke their native Lycaonian, 
 but where no Lycaonian inscription has ever been discovered. 
 The parallel is, however, not satisfactory. Until Lystra has been 
 explored in the manner of Silchester, it seems too early to say 
 that its Lycaonian speech has left no written traces. 
 
 No other Romano-British town has been excavated so extensively 
 or so scientifically as Silchester. None, therefore, has yielded so 
 much evidence. But we have no reason to consider Silchester ex- 
 ceptional in its character. Such scraps a^ we possess from other sites 
 point to similar Romanization elsewhere, Fve, for instance, recurs 
 in the Romano-British country town at Dorchester in Dorset, and all 
 the graffiti on potsherds or tiles that are known to me as found in towns 
 or country houses, are equally Roman. Larger inscriptions, cut on 
 stone, have also been found even in country houses. On the whole the 
 general result is clear. Latin was employed freely in the towns of 
 Britain, not only on serious occasions or by the upper cljisses, but by 
 servants and work-people for the most accidental purposes. It was 
 also used, at least by the upper classes, in the country. Plainly there 
 did not exist in the towns that linguistic gulf between upper class 
 and lower class which can be seen to-day in many cities of eastern 
 Europe, where the employers speak one language and the employed 
 another. On the other hand, it is possible that a diiferent 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 
 maj have spoken Latin, while the peasantry may have used Celtic. 
 No evidence has been discovered to prove this. We may, however, 
 suggest that it is not, in itself, an impossible or even an improbable 
 linguistic division of Roman Britain. 
 
 It remains to cite the literary evidence, distinct if not abundant, 
 as to the employment of Latin in Britain. Agricola, as is well 
 known, encouraged the use of it, with the result (says Tacitus) that 
 the Britons, who had hitherto hated and refused the foreign tongue, 
 became eager to speak it fluently. Forty years later, Juvenal alludes 
 casually to British lawyers taught by Gaulish schoolmasters, and 
 
 form. , suggesting a bilingual sentence such as we find in some Cornish documents 
 of the period when Cornish was definitely giving way to English. Another 
 example, Valens avoti (De'chelette, Vases eeramiques, i. 302), suggests the same 
 stage of development in a different way. 
 
12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Plutarch in his tract on the cessation of oracles mentions one 
 Demetrius of Tarsus, grammarian, who had been teaching in Britain, 
 and mentions him as nothing at all out of the ordinary course. 
 It is plain that by the second century Latin must have been spread- 
 ing 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. 
 
 At this point we might wish to introduce the arguments deducible 
 from philology. We might ask whether the phonetics or the 
 vocabulary of the later Celtic and English languages reveal any traces of 
 the influence of Latin, as a spoken tongue, or give negative testimony 
 to its absence. Unfortunately, the inquiry seems almost hopeless. 
 The facts are obscure and open to dispute, and the conclusions to 
 be drawn from them are quite uncertain. Dogmatic assertions 
 proceeding from this or that philologist are common enough. Trust- 
 worthy results are correspondingly scarce. One instance may be cited in 
 illustration. It has been argued that the name ' Kent ' is derived from 
 the Celtic ' Cantion,' and not from the Latin ' Cantium,' because, 
 according to the rules of Vulgar Latin, ' Cantium ' would have been 
 pronounced ' Cantsium ' in the fifth century, when the Saxons may be 
 supposed to have learnt the name. That is, Celtic was spoken in 
 Kent about 450. Yet it is doubtful whether Latin ' ti ' had really 
 come to be pronounced ' tsi ' in Britain so early as a. d. 450. And it 
 is plainly possible that the Saxons may have learnt the name long 
 years before the reputed date of Hengist and Horsa. The Kentish 
 coast was armed against them and the organization of the 'Saxon 
 Shore ' established about a. d. 300. Their knowledge of the place- 
 name may be at least as old. No other difficulty seems to hinder 
 the derivation of ' Kent ' from the form ' Cantium,' and the whole 
 argument based on the name thus collapses. It is impossible here 
 to go through the whole list of cases which have been supposed to be 
 parallel in their origin to 'Kent,' nor should I, with a scanty knowledge 
 of the subject, be justified in such an attempt. I have selected this 
 particular example because it has been emphasized by a recent writer \ 
 I prefer to pass on to better ascertained facts. 
 
 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 
 
 ' Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 102. I am indebted to Mr. W. H, 
 Stevenson in relation to these philological points. 
 
Fig. 5. Restoration op painted pattern on wall-plaster at Silchesteb, showing 
 
 A purely conventional style based on classical models 
 
 {From Archaeologia) 
 
 To face p. 13] 
 
THE ROMAMZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 13 
 
 was Roman, and the native elements almost wholly succumbed to the 
 foreign conquering influence. In respect to public buildings this is 
 natural. Before the Claudian conquest the Britons can hardly have 
 possessed large structures in stone, and their provision necessarily 
 came from Rome. The fora, basilicas, and temples which have been 
 discovered at Silchester and elsewhere, follow Roman models and 
 resemble similar buildings in other provinces. The characteristics of 
 the private houses are more complicated. In their ground plans we 
 meet types which recur in northern Gaul, but which diiFer essentially 
 from the house-types of Italy or of the Mediterranean provinces of 
 the Empire. The houses of Italy and of the south generally looked 
 inwards upon open impluvia, colonnaded courts and garden plots. 
 They had few outer windows and fitted easily together in the streets 
 of a town. The houses of Britain and Gaul looked outwards on the 
 surrounding country. Their rooms were generally arranged in rows 
 along corridors or cloisters ; they frequently enclosed three sides of 
 a large open yard and were singularly ill-suited to juxtaposition in 
 the streets of a town. We may suppose them to be Roman modifica- 
 tions of some Celtic originals. But this no more implies that their 
 occupants were Celts than the use of a bungalow in India proves the 
 inhabitant an Indian. 
 
 The point is made clearer by the character of the internal fittings, 
 for these are wholly borrowed from Italian sources. If we cannot 
 find in the Romano-British house either atrium or impluvium, 
 tablinum or peristyle, such as we find regularly in Italy, we have 
 none the less the painted wall-plaster (fig. 5) and mosaic floors, the 
 hypocausts and bath-rooms of Italy. The wall-paintings and mosaics 
 may be poorer in Britain, the hypocausts more numerous, but the 
 things themselves are those of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has 
 ever come to light in the whole of Roman Britain which represents 
 any local subject or contains any unclassical feature. The usual 
 ornamentation consists either of mythological scenes, such as Orpheus 
 charming the animals, or Apollo chasing Daphne, or Actaeon 
 rent by his hounds, or of geometrical devices like the so-called 
 Asiatic shields, which are purely of classical origin ^. Perhaps we 
 
 * It has been suggested that these mosaics were principally laid by itinerant 
 Italians. The idea is, of course, due to modern analogies. But it does not 
 seem quite impossible, since the work is in a sense that of an artist, and the pay 
 might be high enough to attract stray decorators of good standing from the Con- 
 tinent. However, no evidence exists to prove this or even to make it probable. 
 The mosaics of Roman Britain, with hardly an exception, are such as might 
 easily be made in a province which was capable of exporting skilled workmen to 
 Gaul (p. 26). They have also the appearance of imitative work copied from 
 
14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 may detect in Britain a special fondness for the cable or guilloche 
 pattern, and we may conjecture that from Romano-British mosaics 
 it passed in a modified form into later Celtic art. But the ornament 
 itself, whether in single border or in many-stranded panels of plait 
 work, occurs not rarely in Italy as well as in thoroughly Romanized 
 lands like southern Spain and southern Gaul and Africa ^. 
 
 Nor is the Roman fashion of house-fittings confined to the 
 mansions of the wealthy. Hypocausts and painted stucco, copied, 
 though crudely, from Roman originals, have been discovered in poor 
 houses and in mean villages *. They formed part, even there, of the 
 ordinary environment of life. They were not, as an eminent writer ' 
 calls them, 'a delicate exotic varnish.' Indeed, I cannot recognize in 
 our Romano-British remains the contrast alleged by this writer 
 * between an exotic culture of a higher order and a vernacular culture 
 of a primitive kind.' There were in Britain splendid houses and 
 poor ones. But a continuous gradation of all sorts of houses and all 
 degrees of comfort connects them, and there is no discernible breach 
 in the scale. Throughout, the dominant element is the Roman 
 provincial fashion which is borrowed from Italy. 
 
 Art shows a rather different picture. Here we reach definite 
 survivals of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before 
 the Claudian conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal 
 and enamel, and characterized by its love for spiral devices and its 
 fantastic use of animal forms. This art — La Tene or Late Celtic or 
 whatever it be styled — was common to all the Celtic area of Europe 
 just before the Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly clear 
 in Britain. When the Romans spread their dominion over the 
 island it almost wholly vanished. For that we are not to blame any 
 evil influence of the Empire. All native arts, however beautiful, 
 
 patterns rather than of designs sketched by artists. It is most natural to 
 suppose that, like the Gaulish Samian ware— which is imitative in just the same 
 fashion — they are local products. 
 
 1 See, for example, the Wollaston Collection of Drawings of Mosaics (in the 
 South Kensington Museum), where examples occur from Rome, Ostia, Pompeii, 
 Carthage, Algeria, and Asia Minor. Compare also Commission d" Arch^ologie 
 (HAix (Aix en Provence, 1844), plate 2 (enclos Milhaud) ; A. Laborde, Description 
 d'un pave en mosdique decouvert dans Fancienne villa ditalica (Paris, 1802), &c. 
 See p. 27, note. 
 
 * R, C. Hoare, Ancient Wilts, Roman Aera, p. 127 : ' On some of the highest 
 of our downs I have found stuccoed and painted walls, as well as hypocausts, 
 introduced into the rude settlements of the Britons.' This is fully borne out by 
 Gen. Pitt-Rivers' discoveries near Rushmore, to be mentioned below. Similar 
 rude hypocausts were opened some years ago in my presence at Eastbourne. 
 
 ' Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 39. 
 
Fig. 6. Late-Celtic metal work, xh\\ in the British Museum 
 
 "0 face p. 14] 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 15 
 
 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 the country 
 folk. Disraeli somewhere describes a Syrian lady preferring the 
 French polish of a western boot to the jewels of an eastern slipper. 
 With a similar preference the British Celt abandoned his national art 
 and adopted the Roman provincial fashion. 
 
 He did not abandon it entirely. Little local manufactures of 
 pottery or fibulae testify to its sporadic survival. Such are the 
 
 Fig. 7. Fragments of New Forest pottery with leap patterns. 
 (From Archaeologia). 
 
 brooches with Celtic affinities made (as it seems) near Brough (Verterae) 
 in Westmorland, and the New Forest urns with their curious leaf 
 ornamentation, and above all the Castor ware from the banks of 
 the Nen, five miles west of Peterborough. We may briefly examine 
 this last instance \ At Castor and Chesterton, on the north and south 
 sides of the river, were two straggling Romano-British settlements of 
 
 1 Victoria Hist, of Northamptonshire, i. 206-213 ; Artis, Durobrivae of Antoninus 
 (fol. 1828). For the New Forest ware see the Victoria Hist, of Hampshire,!. 326, 
 and Archaeol. Journal, xxx. 319. The Brough brooches have been pointed out 
 by Mr. A. J. Evans, whose work on Late Celtic Art is the foundation of all 
 that has since been written on it, but have not been discussed in detail. 
 
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 comfortable houses, furnished in genuine Roman style. Round them 
 were extensive pottery works. The ware, or at least the most character- 
 istic of the wares, made in these works is generally known as Castor 
 or Durobrivian ware. Castor was not, indeed, its only place of manu- 
 facture. It was produced freely in northern Gaul, and possibly else- 
 where in Britain \ But Castor is the best known and best attested 
 manufacturing centre, and the easiest for us to examine. The ware 
 directly embodies the Celtic tradition. It has indeed its classical 
 elements, foliated scrolls, hunting scenes, and occasionally mythological 
 
 Fig. 8. Hercules rescuing Hesionb. From a piece of Castor ware found in 
 Northamptonshire. (C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant. vol. iv, plate XXIV.) 
 
 representations (figs. 8-10). But it recasts many of these elements with 
 the vigour of a true art and in accordance with its special tendencies. 
 Those fantastic animals with strange outstretched legs and backturned 
 heads and eager eyes ; those tiny scrolls scattered by way of decoration 
 above or below them ; the rude beading which serves, not ineffectively, for 
 ornament or for dividing line ; the suggestion of returning spirals ; the 
 evident delight of the artist in plant and animal forms and his neglect 
 of the human figure — all these are Celtic. When we turn to the rarer 
 
 ' For the Belgic 'Castor ware ' see de Bast, Antiquit4s romaines trouvees dans 
 la Flandre (Gand, 1808), plates x, xi ; H. du Cleuziou, Poterie gauloise (Paris, 
 1872), fig. 173, from Cologne ; Sammlung rom. Alterth. von G. JViessen (Koln, 
 1896), p. 30, nos. 574-86 ; Brongniart, Traits des arts ceram., pi. xxix (Ghent 
 and Rheinzabern). M. Salomon Reinach tells me that the ware is not infrequent 
 in the departments of the valleys of the Seine, Marne, and Oise. The 
 Colchester gladiator's urn mentioning the thirtieth legion (C. R. Smith 
 Coll. Ant., iv. 82, C. vii. 1336, 3) may well be of Rhenish manufacture. 
 

 s 
 
 e 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIxN 17 
 
 scenes in which man is specially prominent— a hunt, or a gladiatorial 
 show, or Hesione fettered to a rock and Hercules saving her from 
 the monster^— the vigour fails. The artist could not or would 
 not cope with the human form. His nude figures, Hesione and 
 Hercules, and his clothed gladiators are not fantastic but grotesque. 
 They retain traces of Celtic treatment, as in Hesione's hair (fig. 8). 
 But the general treatment is Roman. The Late Celtic art is here 
 sinking into the general conventionalism of the Roman provinces. 
 
 A second instance may be cited, this time from sculpture, of im- 
 portant British work which is Celtic, or at least un-Roman (fig. 11). 
 The Spa at Bath (Aquae Sulis) contained a temple to Sul or Sulis 
 Minerva, goddess of the waters. The pediment of this temple, 
 partly preserved by a lucky accident, 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, standard (?), and cuirass. It 
 is a classical group, such as occurs on other Roman reliefs. But its 
 treatment breaks clean away from the classical. The sculptor placed 
 on the shield a Gorgon's head, as suits alike Minerva and a shield. 
 But he gave to the Gorgon a beard and moustache, almost in the 
 manner of a head of Fear, and he wrought its features with a fierce 
 virile vigour that finds no kin in Greek or Roman art. I need not 
 here discuss the reasons which may have led him to add the male 
 attributes to a female type. For our present purpose the handling 
 of the subject is more noteworthy than its details. It is proof that, 
 once at least, the supremacy of the dominant conventional art of the 
 Empire could be rudely broken down. 
 
 Exceptions are always more interesting than rules — even in grammar. 
 But the exceptions pass and the rules remain. The Castor ware and 
 the Gorgon's head are exceptions. The rule stands that the material 
 civilization of Britain was Roman. Except the Gorgon, almost every 
 worked or sculptured stone at Bath follows the classical conventions. 
 Except the Castor and New Forest pottery, almost all the better 
 earthenware in use in Britain obeys the same law. The kind that 
 was most generally employed for all but the meaner purposes, was 
 not Castor but Samian or terra sigillata *. This ware is singularly 
 
 ' This, or the corresponding scene of Perseus and Andromeda, is a favourite 
 with artists in northern Gaul and Britain. It occurs on tombstones at Chester 
 (Grosveiior Museum Catalogue, i^o. 138) and Trier (Hettner, Die rum. Steindenkmiiler 
 zu Trier, p. 206), and Arlon (Wiltheim, Luciliburgensia, plate 57), and the Igel 
 monument. For other instances see Roscher's Lexikon MythoU, under Hesione. 
 
 ^ I may record here a protest against the attempts made from time to time to 
 dispossess the term ' Samian.' Nothing better has been suggested in its stead, 
 and the word itself has the merit of perfect lucidity. It has, of course, nothing 
 
 G 2 
 
18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 characteristic of Roman provincial art. At its best it is handsome 
 enough. But it is copied almost wholesale from the red Arretine of 
 Etruria. It is purely imitative and conventional, and its details, 
 as often happens in a conventional art, are often little better than 
 a jumble of decorations that do not fit into any coherent story or 
 sequence. In subject and design it is purely classical. Both its 
 geometrical ornament and its figured panels are drawn from Italian 
 sources, and Late Celtic influences are very seldom if ever apparent.; 
 This is the ordinary good pottery that was used throughout the western 
 Empire, and indeed in Italy itself, just as in Britain. Its universal 
 occurrence illustrates well enough the whole character of RomaA 
 provincial civilization. 
 
 The contrast between this civilization and the native culture that 
 preceded it in Britain can readily be seen if we compare for a moment 
 a Celtic village and a Romano-British village. Examples of each 
 have been excavated in the south-west of England, hardly thirty miles 
 apart. The Celtic village is close to Glastonbrn-y in Somerset. Of 
 itself it is a small, poor place — ^just a group of pile dwellings rising 
 out of a marsh, or (as it may then have been) a lake, and dating 
 from the two centuries immediately preceding the Christian era^. 
 Poor as it was, its art is clearly marked. There one recognizes 
 all that delight in decoration and that genuine artistic instincff 
 which mark Late Celtic art, while the details of the objects reveal 
 clearly enough, by their use of the returning spiral, their aflinityi 
 with the same native fashion. On the other hand, no trace ofl 
 classical workmanship or design intrudes. There has not been found 
 anywhere in the village even & fibula with a hinge instead of a spring,'| 
 or an Italian (as opposed to a Late Celtic) pattern. Turn 'now 
 to the Romano-British villages excavated by General Pitt-Rivers at 
 Woodcuts and Rotherley and Woodyates, eleven miles south-west 
 of Salisbury, near the Roman road from Old Sarum (Sorbiodutium) 
 to Dorchester in Dorset ^. Here you may search in vain for vestiges 
 
 to do with Samos. But no one now would suppose that it had. Of the various 
 substitutes suggested, ' Pseudo- Arretine ' is clumsy, and 'Terra Sigillata' is 
 at least as incorrect. 
 
 ' The village has been excavated to some extent and intermittently, since 
 1892. But the results have not been yet adequately published. The Glaston- 
 bury Antiquarian Society issued a pamphlet. The British Lake Village near 
 Glastonbury, iu 1899, and chance items have appeared in various periodicals and 
 books. Some excavations in 1902 and 1904 are described in the Proceedings of 
 the Somerset Archaeol. Society, vols, xlviii and 1. The objects discovered are 
 nearly all in the Glastonbury Museum. 
 
 ^ Described in four quarto volumes, Excavations in Cranborne Chase near 
 Rushmore, &c., issued privately by Gen, Pitt-Rivers, 1887-1898. 
 
Fig. 11. Head of male Gorgon, from the pediment of the 
 Temple op Sul Minerva at Bath 
 
 To face p. i8] 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 19 
 
 of the native art or of that delight in artistic ornament which 
 characterizes it. Everywhere the monotonous Roman culture meets 
 the eye. To pass from Glastonbury to Woodcuts, is like passing 
 from some old timbered village of Kent or Sussex to the uniform 
 streets of a modem city suburb. Life at Woodcuts had, no doubt, 
 its barbaric side. One writer who has discussed its character with 
 a view to the present problem ^ comments, with evident distaste, 
 on ' dwellings connected with pits used as storage rooms, refuse sinks, 
 and burial places ' and ' corpses crouching in un-Roman positions.' 
 The first feature is not without its parallels in modern countries 
 and it was doubtless common in ancient Italy. The second would 
 be more significant, if such skeletons occupied all or even the majority 
 of the graves in these villages. Neither feature really mars the broad 
 result, that the material life was Roman. Perhaps the villagers 
 knew little enough of the Roman civilization in its higher aspects. 
 Perhaps they did not speak Latin fluently or habitually. They may 
 well have counted among the less Romanized of the southern Britons. 
 Yet round them too hung the heavy inevitable atmosphere of the 
 Roman material civilization. 
 
 The facts which I have tried to set forth in the preceding para- 
 graphs seem to me to possess more weight than is always allowed. 
 Some writers, for instance M. Loth, speak as if the external environ- 
 ment of daily life, the furniture and decorations and architecture of 
 our houses, or the clothes and buckles and brooches of our dress, 
 bore no relation to the feelings and sentiments of those that used 
 them. That is not a tenable proposition. The external fabric of 
 life is not a negligible quantity but a real factor. On the one 
 hand, it is hardly credible that an unromanized folk should adopt so 
 much of Roman things as the British did, and yet remain uninfluenced. 
 And it is equally incredible that, while it remained unromanized, it 
 should either care or understand how to borrow all the externals of 
 Roman life. The truth of this was clear to Tacitus in the days when 
 the Romanization of Britain was proceeding. It may be recognized 
 in the East or in Africa to-day, and even among the civilized nations 
 of the present age the recent growth of stronger national feelings 
 has been accompanied by a preference for home-products and home- 
 manufactures and a distaste for foreign surroundings, 
 
 ' Vinogradoffj Growth of the Manor, p. 39. A parallel to the non-Roman 
 burials found by Gen. Pitt-Rivers may be found in the will of a Lingonian Gaul 
 who died probably in the latter part of the first century. Apparently he was 
 a Roman citizen, and his will is drawn in strict Roman fashion. But its last 
 clause orders the burning of all his hunting apparatus, spears and nets, &c., on 
 his funeral pyre, and thus betrays the Gaulish habit (Bruns, p. 275). 
 
W PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 I have now dealt with the language and the material civiliza- 
 tion of the province of Britain. I pass on to a third and harder 
 question, the legal and economic framework of Romano-British life. 
 Here, more even than in any other part of the subject, our direct 
 knowledge is singularly scanty. Britain, we know, contained five 
 municipalities of the privileged Italian type. The colonia of Camulo- 
 dunum (Colchester) and the municipium of Verulamium (St. Albans), 
 both in the south-east of the island, were established soon after the 
 Claudian conquest. The colonia of Lindum (Lincoln) may have been 
 founded in the Flavian period (a. d. 70-96), during the early part or 
 the middle of which the legion at Lincoln was probably pushed forward 
 to York. The colonia at Glevum (Gloucester) arose in a. d. 96-98, as an 
 inscription seems definitely to attest. Lastly, the colonia at Ebura- 
 cum (York) must have grown up during the second or the early third 
 century, under the ramparts of the legionary fortress, and separated 
 from it only by the intervening river Ouse.^ Each of these five 
 towns had, doubtless, its dependent ager attributtts, which may have 
 been as large as an average English county, and each provided the 
 local government for its territory.^ But that accounts, on the most 
 liberal estimate, for barely one-eighth of the civilized area of the 
 province. 
 
 Of the rest, some part may have been included in the Imperial 
 Domains, which covered wide tracts in every province and were 
 administered for local purposes by special procurators of the Emperor. 
 The lead-mining districts — Mendip in Somerset, the neighbourhood 
 of Matlock in Derbyshire, the Shelve Hills west of Wroxeter, the 
 Halkyn region in Flintshire, the moors of south-west Yorkshire — 
 must have belonged to these Domains, and for the most part are 
 actually attested by inscriptions on lead-pigs as Imperial property. 
 Of other domain lands we meet one early instance at Silchester in the 
 reign of Nero ^ — perhaps the confiscated estates of some British prince 
 
 ' The fortress was situated on the left or east bank of the Ouse close to the 
 present cathedral, which stands wholly within its area. A part of the Roman 
 walls can still be traced, especially at the so-called Multangular Tijwer. The 
 municipality lay on the other (west) bank of the Ouse, near the railway station, 
 where various mosaics indicate dwelling-houses. Its outline and plan are 
 however not known. Even its situation has not been generally recognized, 
 
 ' If the evidence of milestones may be pressed, the ' territory ' of Eburacum 
 extended southwards at least twenty miles to Castleford, and that of Lincoln at 
 least fourteen miles to Littleborough {Ephemeris Epigraphica, vii. 1105, where 
 the last two lines are AVGG EB|MP XX (or XXII), and 1097). The general size 
 of these municipal territoria is amply proved by continental inscriptions. 
 
 " Tile found in 1904, inscribed NERCLC^A'^GER, Nero Claudius Caesar 
 Augustus Germanicus. It differs markedly from the ordinary tiles found at Sil- 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 21 
 
 or noble — and though we have no fiirther direct evidence, the analogy 
 of other provinces suggests that the area increased as the years went 
 by. Yet it is likely that in Britain, as indeed in Gaul,^ the domain 
 lands were comparatively small in amount. Like the mimicipalities, 
 they account only for a part of the province. 
 
 Throughout all the rest of the British province, or at least of 
 its civilized area, the local government was probably organized on 
 the same cantonal system as obtained in northern Gaul. According 
 to this system the local unit was the old territory of the tribe or 
 canton, and the local magistrates were the chiefs or nobles of the 
 tribe. That may appear at first sight to be a native system, and 
 wholly out of harmony with the Roman method of government by 
 municipalities. Yet such was not its actual effect. The cantonal 
 or tribal magistrates were classified and arranged just like the 
 magistrates of a municipality. Even the same titles were in use. The 
 cantonal civitas had its duoviri and quaestors and so forth, and its 
 ordo or senate, precisely like any municipal colonia or municipium. 
 So far from wearing a national aspect, this cantonal system merely 
 became one of the influences which aided the romanization of the 
 country. It did not, indeed, involve, like the municipal system, the 
 substitution of an Italian for a native institution. Instead, it per- 
 mitted the complete remodelling of the native institution by the 
 interpenetration of Italian influences. 
 
 We can discern the cantonal system at several points in Britain. But 
 the British cantons were smaller and less wealthy than those of Gaul, 
 and therefore they have not left their mark, either in monuments or 
 in nomenclature, so clearly as we might desire. Many inscriptions 
 record the working of the system in Gaul. Many modern towns — 
 Paris, Reims, Chartres, and half a hundred others — derive their present 
 names from those of the ancient cantons, and not from those of the 
 ancient towns. In Britain we find only one such inscription (fig. 12),^ 
 
 Chester, and obviously belongs to a different period in the history of the site. 
 The estate, or whatever it was, may not have remained imperial after Nero's fall: 
 compare Plutarch, Galba 5. The Combe Down principia (C. vii. 62) may supply 
 another instance, of about a. d. 210. 
 
 ' Hirschfeld in Lehmann's Beitrlige sur alten Geschichte, iii. 307, 308. Much 
 of the Gaulish domain land appears to date from confiscations in a. d. 197. 
 
 ' Found at Venta Silurum (Caerwent) in 1903 : . . . leg. legi[i] Aug. proconml{{) 
 provinc. Narbonerms, leg. Aug. pr. pr. provi. Lugudunensis : ex decreto ordinis 
 respublica civit(atis) Silurum — a monument erected by the cantonal senate of the 
 Silures to some general of the legion at Isca Silurum, twelve miles from 
 Caerwent — perhaps to Claudius Paulinus, early in third century (Athenaeum, 
 Sept. 26, 1903 ; Archaeologia, lix. 120). Other inscriptions mention a civis 
 
22 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 only one town called in antiquity by a tribal name — and that a 
 doubtful instance ^ — and no single case of a modern town name which 
 
 I. 
 
 I 
 
 , r5-T)ECR%TG 
 PVE.bCIV.I'^ 
 
 A\ 
 
 i 
 
 p. 
 
 Fig. 12. Inscription found at Caebwent (Venta Silurum) mentioning 
 
 A DECREE OP THE SENATE OF THE CaNTON OF SiLDRES. 
 
 is derived from the name of a tribe.^ We can only say that the system 
 
 Cantius, a civitas Catuvellaunorum, &c. , but their evidence is less distinct and is 
 wholly silent as to the cantonal government. 
 
 ' Icinos in Itin. Ant. 474. 6 may be Venta Icenorum, Victoria Hist, of Norfolk, 
 i. 286, 300. 
 
 ' Canterbury may seem an exception. But its name comes ultimately from 
 Cantium, not from the Cantii. In the south-west and in Wales, tribal names 
 lilie Dumnonii, Demetae, Ordovices, have lingered on in one form or another, 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 23 
 
 existed, and existed (apparently) in exactly the same form as in Gaul. 
 But it was weak. It went down only too easily when the Empire fell. 
 Of the smaller local organizations, little can be said. Towns existed. 
 But most of them were tribal capitals — as titles like Calleva Atre- 
 batum or Corinium Dobunorum imply — and were doubtless ruled by 
 the senates and magistrates of the tribes. It is idle to guess who 
 administered the towns that were not such capitals or who controlled 
 the various villages scattered through the country. Nor can we 
 pretend to know much more about the size and character of the 
 estates which corresponded to the country houses and farms of which 
 remains survive. The 'villa' system of demesne farms and serfs or 
 coloni^ which obtained elsewhere, was doubtless familiar in Britain, 
 and 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.^ It is quite possible that here, or indeed 
 in any province, other forms of estates and of land tenure may have 
 existed beside the predominant villa.^ The one thing needed is 
 evidence. And in any case the net result appears to stand fast. 
 The bulk of British local government must have been carried on by 
 Roman municipalities, by imperial estates, and still more by tribal 
 
 and according to Prof. Rh^s, Bernicia is derivable from Brigantes. But these 
 cases differ entirely from the Gaulish parallels mentioned in the text. 
 
 ^ The term ' villa ' is generally used to denote Romano-British country 
 houses and farms, irrespective of their legal classification. The use is so firmly 
 established, both in England and abroad, that it would be idle to attempt to 
 alter it. But for clearness I have thought it better in this paper to employ the 
 term ' villa ' only where I refer to the definite ' villa ' system. 
 
 ^ For instance Mr. Seebohm (English Village Community, T^ip. 264 foil.) connects 
 the suffix ' ham ' with the Roman ' villa ' and apparently argues that the 
 occurrence of the suffix indicates in general the former existence of a ' villa. ' 
 But his map showing the percentage of local names ending in ' ham ' in various 
 counties disproves his view completely. For the distribution of the suffix ' ham ' 
 and the frequency of Roman country houses and farms do not coincide. In 
 Norfolk, for instance, ' ham ' is common, but there is hardly a trace of a Roman 
 country house or farm in the whole county (Victoria Hist, of Norfolk, i. pp. 294- 
 298). Somerset on the other hand is crowded with Roman country houses and 
 has hardly any ' hams.' 
 
 ' Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor (ch. ii), argues strongly for the existence 
 of Celtic land tenures besides the Roman ' villa ' system. ' There was room (he 
 suggests) for all sorts of conditions, from almost exact copies of Roman 
 municipal corporations and Italian country houses to tribal arrangements 
 scarcely coloured by a thin sprinkling of imperial administration ' (p. 83). As 
 will be seen, I think this not improbable. But I can find no definite proof of it. 
 If the condition of northern Gaul were better known to us, it might provide 
 a decisive analogy. But the Gaulish evidence itself seems at present disputable. 
 
M PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 civitates working on a Romanized constitution. The bulk of the 
 landed estates must have conformed in their legal aspects to the 
 ' villas ' of other provinces. Whatever room there may be for survival 
 of native customs or institutions, vre have no evidence that they 
 survived within the Romanized area, either in great amount or in any 
 form which contrasted with the general Roman character of the 
 country. 
 
 From this consideration of the evidence available to illustrate the 
 Romanization of Britain, I pass to inquire how far history helps to 
 trace the chronology of the process. A few facts emerge to guide us. 
 It is fairly certain that the whole lowland area, as far west as Exeter 
 and Shrewsbury, and as far north as the Humber, was conquered 
 before Claudius died, and Romanization may have commenced at 
 once. Thirty years later Agricola, who was obviously a better 
 administrator than a general, openly encouraged the process. Accord- 
 ing to Tacitus, his efforts met with great success. Latin began to 
 be spoken, the toga to be worn, temples, town halls, and private 
 houses to be built in Roman fashion ^. Certainly it is just at this 
 period (about 80-85 a.d.) that towns like Silchester, Bath, Caerwent 
 (Venta Silurum), seem to take definite shape ^, and civil judges (legati 
 iuridici) were appointed, presumably to administer the justice more 
 frequently required by the advancing civilization ^. In a. d. 85 it 
 was thought possible to reduce the garrison by a legion and some 
 auxiliaries *. Progress, however, was not maintained. About 115- 
 120, and again about 155-160 and 175-180, the northern part of the 
 province was vexed by serious risings, and the civilian area was doubt- 
 less kept somewhat in disturbance ^. Probably it was at some point 
 
 ^ Tac. Agr. 21, quoted in note 2 to p. 3. 
 
 ' Silchester was plainly laid out in Roman fashion all at once on a definite 
 street plan, and though some few of its houses may be older, the town as 
 a whole seems to have taken its rise from this event. The evidence of coins 
 implies that the development of the place began in the Flavian period 
 {Athenaeum, Dec. 16, 1904). At Bath the earliest datable stones belong to the 
 same time (Victoria Hist, of Somerset, vol. i, Roman Bath), the first being 
 a fragmentary inscription of a. d. 76. At Caerwent the evidence is confined to 
 coins and fibulae, none of which seem earlier than Vespasian or Domitian : for 
 the coins see Clifton Antiq. Club's Proceedings, v. 170-182. 
 
 ' A. von Domaszewski, Ehein. Mus., xlvi. 699 ; C. ix. 5633 (as completed by 
 Domaszewski), inscription of Salvius Liberalis ; C. iii. 2864=9960, inscription of 
 lavolenus Priscus. Both these iuridici belong to the Flavian period. Other 
 instances are known from the second century. 
 
 * Classical Review, xviii. (1904) 468 ; xix. (1905) 58, withdrawal of Batavian 
 cohorts. The withdrawal of the Legio ii Adiutriac is well known. 
 
 ^ See my papers in Archaeologia Aeliana, xxv. (1904) 142-147, and Proceedings 
 ofSoc. of Antiq. of Scotland, xxxviii. 454. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 25 
 
 in this period that the flourishing country town Isurium (Aldborough), 
 fifteen miles from York, had to shield itself by a stone wall and 
 ditch ^. Peace hardly set in till the opening of the third century. 
 It was then, I think, that country houses and farms first became 
 common in all parts of the civilized area. The statistics of datable 
 objects discovered in these buildings seem conclusive on this point. 
 Except in Kent and the south-eastern region generally, coins and 
 pottery of the first century are infrequent, and many sites have 
 yielded nothing earlier than 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 \ a period of progressive prosperity. 
 Certainly, the number of British country houses inhabited during the 
 years a. d. 250-350 must have been very large. Prosperity culminated 
 perhaps in the Constaotinian 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 ^. Then also British corn was largely exported to the Rhine 
 valley*, and British cloth earned a notice in the eastern Edict of 
 Diocletian ^. The province at that time was a prosperous and 
 civilized region, where Latin speech and culture might be expected 
 to prevail widely. 
 
 But no golden age lasts long. Before 350 Constans had to 
 cross the Channel and repel the Picts*. After 369 such aid was 
 more often and more urgently required. Significantly enough, many 
 
 ' The town wall of Isurium, partly visible to-day in Mr. A. S. Lawson's 
 garden, is constructed in a fashion which suggests rather the second century 
 than the later date when most of the town walls in Britain and Gaul were probably 
 built, the end of the third or even the fourth century. Moreover its stones 
 show the 'diamond brooching,' which occurs on the Vallum of Pius (^Glasgow 
 Archaeol. Soc, Antonine Wall Report, p. 61, plate, and recent finds) and which 
 must therefore have been in use during the second century. 
 
 ^ Mommsen, Rom. Gesch., v. 97, 106, and Ausonius, pasrfwj. 
 
 ' Eumenius, Paneg. Constantio Caesari, 21 civUas Aeduorum . . . plurimos quibus 
 illae provinciae (Britain) redundabant accepit artifices, et nunc exstructione veterum 
 domorum et refectione operum publicorum et templorum instauratione consurgit. 
 
 * Ammianus, xviii. 2. 3 ; Zosimus, iii. 5. 
 
 " Edict. Diocl. xix. 36. Compare Eumenius, Paneg. Constantino Aug., 9 
 pecorum innumerabilis multitudo . . . onusta velleribus, and Constantio Caesari, 21 
 tanto laeta munere pastionum. Traces of dyeing worlcs 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.). 
 
 ' Ammianus, xx. 1. The expedition was iiliportant enough to be recorded — 
 unless I am mistaken — on coins such as those which show victorious Constans on 
 a galley, recrossing the Channel after his success (Cohen, 9-13, &c.). 
 
26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 of the lists of coins found in country houses close about 350-360. 
 The rural districts, it is plain, began then to be no longer safe, and 
 some houses were burnt by marauding bands, and some abandoned 
 by their owners^. 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 % was the 
 forerunner of a numerous class. Finally, the great raid of 4<06-4i07 
 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 ^. 
 
 Such is, in brief, the positive evidence, archaeological, linguistic, 
 and historical, which illustrates the Romanization of Britain. The 
 conclusions which it allows seem to be two. First, and mainly: 
 the Empire did its work in our island as it did generally on the 
 western continent. It Romanized the province, introducing Roman 
 speech and thought and culture. Secondly, this Romanization was 
 perhaps not uniform throughout all sections of the population. 
 Within the lowlands the result was on the whole achieved. In the 
 towns and among the upper class in the country Romanization 
 
 ' See, for example, the coin finds of the country houses at Thruxton, Abbots 
 Ann, Clanville, Holbury, Carisbrooke, &c. , in Hampshire ( Victoria Hist, of Hants, 
 i. 294 foil.). The Croydon hoard deposited about a. d. 351 (^Numismatic Chronicle, 
 1906, p. 37) may be assigned to the same cause. 
 
 ' It is hard to believe him an Irishman, though Professor Rhys supports the 
 idea (Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc, Kerry Meeting, 1891). The one ancient 
 authority, Aurelius Victor (xxxix. 20), describes him simply as Menapiae civis. 
 The Gaulish Menapii were well known ; the Irish Menapii were very obscure, 
 and the brief reference can only refer to the former. 
 
 ' Mommsen, Eom. Gesch., v. 177. Zosimus, vi. 5 (a.d. 408), in a very puzzling 
 passage describes Britain as revolting from Rome when Constantine was tyrant 
 (a.d. 407-411). It is generally assumed that when Constantine failed to protect 
 these regions, they set up for themselves, and in that troubled time such a step 
 would be natural enough. But Zosimus, a little later on (vi. 10, a.d. 410), 
 casually states that Honorius wrote to Britain, bidding the provincials defend 
 themselves (if that be what his brief phrase means), so that the act of 408 
 cannot have been final. In any case the ' groans of the Britons ' recorded by 
 Gildas show that the island clung 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. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 27 
 
 was substantially complete— as complete as in northern Gaul, and 
 possibly indeed even more complete. But both the lack of definite 
 evidence and the probabilities of the case require us to admit that 
 the peasantry may have been less thoroughly Romanized. It was 
 covered with a superimposed layer of Roman civilization. But 
 beneath this layer the native element may have remained potentially, 
 if not actually, Celtic, and in the remoter districts the native speech 
 may have lingered on, like Erse or Manx to-day, as a rival to the 
 more fashionable Latin. How far this happened actually within the 
 civilized lowland area we cannot tell. But we may be sure that the 
 military region, Wales and the north, never became thoroughly 
 Romanized, and Cornwall and western Devon also lie beyond the 
 pale (p. 8). Here the Britons must have remained Celtic, or at least 
 capable of a reversion to the Celtic tradition. Here, at any rate, 
 a Celtic revival was possible. 
 
 So far we have considered the province of Britain while it 
 still remained in real fact a province. Let us now turn to 
 the sequel and ask how it fits in with its antecedents. The 
 Romanization, we find, held its own for a while. The sense of 
 belonging to the Empire had not quite died out even in sixth-century 
 Britain. Roman names continued to be used, not exclusively but 
 freely enough, by Britons. Roman ' culture words ' seem to survive 
 in the later British language, and some at least of these may be 
 traceable to the Roman occupation of the island. Roman military 
 terms occur, if scantily. Roman inscriptions are occasionally set up. 
 The Roman period in Britain was plainly no mere interlude, which 
 passed without leaving a mark behind ^. But it was crossed by two 
 hostile forces, a Celtic revival and an English invasion. 
 
 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 in- 
 fluences in favour of a Celtic revival. And they were all the more 
 potent because, about the period under discussion, the opening 
 of the fifth century, a Celtic migration seems to have set in from 
 
 ^ Much of the ornamentation used hy 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 is borrowed from Romano-British 
 originals and how far from similar Roman provincial work on the Continent, is 
 not very clear. See p. 14. 
 
28 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 the Irish coasts. The details of this migration are unknown, and 
 the few traces which survive of it are faint and not altogether 
 decisive. 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 ^. 
 At a date given commonly as a. d. 265-270 — though there does not 
 seem to be any good reason for it — the Dessi or Deisi were expelled 
 from Meath and a part of them settled in the far 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 Prof. Bury suggests, with the consent of 
 the Imperial Government and under conditions of service. But 
 if the newcomers were few and their new homes were in the remote 
 west beyond Carmarthen (Maridunum), formal consent would hardly 
 have been required, and, as dates are uncertain, it is perhaps safer 
 not to decide this point. Other Irish immigrants probably followed. 
 Their settlements were apparently confined to Cornwall and the 
 south-west coast of Wales, and their influence may easily be overrated. 
 Some, indeed, came as enemies, though perhaps rather as enemies 
 to the Roman than to the Celtic elements in the province. Such 
 must have been Niall of the Nine Hostages who was killed — 
 according to the traditional chronology — about a. d. 405 on the 
 British coast and perhaps in the Channel itself. 
 
 All this must have contributed to the reintroduction of Celtic 
 national feeling and culture. A Celtic immigrant, it may be, was 
 the man who set up the Ogam pillar at Silchester (fig. 13), which 
 was discovered in the excavations of 1893.^ The circumstances of 
 
 * Professor Rh^s, Cambrian Archaeol. Assoc. Kerry Meeting, 1891, and Celtic 
 Britain (ed. 3, 1906, p. 247), is inclined to minimize the invasions of the south 
 of Britain (Cornwall and Wales). Professor Bury {Life of St. Patrick, p. 288) 
 tends to magnify them ; see also Zimmer, Nennius Vindicatus, p. 84 foil. The 
 decision of the question seems to depend upon whether we should regard the 
 Goidelic elements visible in western Britain as due in part to an original 
 Goidelic population or ascribe them wholly to Irish immigrants. At present 
 philologists do not seem able to speak with certainty on this point. 
 
 ^ Archaeologia, liv. 233, 441 ; Rh^s and Brynmor Jones, Welsh People, pp. 45, 
 65 ; Victoria Hist, of Hampshire, i. 279 ; English Hist. Rev. 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. But Professor Rh^s tells me that the Silchester 
 example may quite conceivably belong to the fifth century. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 29 
 
 the discovery show that this pillar belongs to the very latest period 
 in the history of Calleva. Its inscripbion is Goidelic : that is, it does 
 not belong to the ordinary Callevan population. It may be best 
 explained, I think, as the work of some western Celt who reached 
 Silchester before its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We 
 do not know the date of that event, though we may conjecturally 
 put it before a.d. 500. In any case an Ogam monument had been 
 set up before it occurred, and 
 the presence of such an object 
 there proves that Celtic things 
 had come to be tolerated even 
 in this eastern Romanized town. 
 But a more powerful aid to 
 the revival may be found in 
 another fact. That is the de- 
 struction of the Romanized part 
 of Britain by the invading 
 Saxons. War, and especially 
 war against invaders, must al- 
 ways weaken the higher forms 
 of any country's civilization. 
 Here the agony was long, and 
 the assailants cruel and power- 
 ful ; and the country itself was 
 somewhat weak. Its wealth was 
 easily exhausted. Its towns were 
 small. Its fortresses were not 
 impregnable. Its leaders were 
 divided and disloyal. More- 
 over 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 Essex, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly 
 populated and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates. 
 Fifty or seventy years later the raiders, whether English seamen or 
 Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland, devastated most parts 
 of the province and probably reached even the midlands.^ When, 
 
 Fig. 13. 
 
 ooam inscription from 
 Silchester. 
 
 1 Patrick was carried off from Bannavem Taberniae. If this represents 
 Bannaventa near Daventry in Northants {Victoria Hist. i. 186), the raids must 
 have covered all the midlands. See Engl. Hist. Review, 1896, p. 711 ; Zimmer, 
 
30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 seventy years later still, the English came, no longer to plunder but 
 to settle, they occupied first the Romanized area of the island. As 
 the Romano-Britons retired from the south and east, as Silchester 
 was evacuated in despair ^ and Bath and Wroxeter stormed and left 
 desolate, the very centres of romanized life were extinguished. 
 During the long series of disasters, many of the Romanized in- 
 habitants of these regions must have perished. Many must have 
 fallen into captivity and 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.^ 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. But 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 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 infrequent or insignificant, were unevenly dis- 
 tributed. At some period not precisely known, perhaps in the first 
 half or the middle of the third century, it was in open rebellion, and 
 the commander of the sixth legion (at York), one Artorius Justus, was 
 sent with a part of the British garrison to reduce it to obedience.* 
 
 Eealencycl. fur protestantische Theologie, x (1901), Art. Keltische Kirche ; Bury, 
 Life of St. Patrick, p. 322. 
 
 ' Engl. Hist. Review, xix. 625 ; Fox, Victoria Hist, of Hampshire, i. 371-372. 
 
 ^ How much of Britain was still British when Gildas wrote, he does not tell 
 us. But he mentions only the extreme west (Damnonii, Demetae) ; his general 
 atmosphere is Celtic, and his rhetoric contains no references to a flourishing 
 civilization. We may conclude that the Romanized part of Britain had been 
 lost by his time, or that, if some part was still held by the British, long war had 
 destroyed its civilization. Unfortunately we cannot trust the traditional English 
 chronology of the period. As to the date of Gildas, cf. W. Stevenson, Academy, 
 26 Oct. 1895, etc. I see no reason to put either Gildas or any part of the Epistula 
 later than about 640. 
 
 ' C. iii. 1919 = Dessau 2770. The inscription must be later than (about) 
 A. D. 200, and it somewhat resembles another inscription (0. iii. 3228) of the 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 31 
 
 It may therefore have been, as Mommsen suggests, one of the least 
 Romanized portions of Gaul, and in it the native idiom may have 
 retained unusual vitality. Yet it would probably have become 
 assimilated to the general Romano-Gaulish civilization, had its Celtic 
 elements not received fresh strength from a British immigration. 
 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 the 
 names, came from Devon and Cornwall,^ 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.^ We must connect 
 him, and indeed the whole fifth-century movement of Britons into 
 Gaul, with the Celtic revival and with the same causes that produced, 
 for instance, the Scotic invasion of Caledonia. 
 
 This destruction of Romano-British life produced a curious result 
 which would be difficult to explain if we could not assign it to this 
 cause. There is a marked and unmistakable gap between the 
 Romano-British and the later Celtic periods. However numerous 
 may be the Latin personal names and ' culture words ' in Welsh, 
 it is beyond question that the tradition of Roman days was lost in 
 Britain during the fifth or early sixth century. That is seen plainly 
 in the scanty literature of the age. Gildas wrote about a. d. 540, 
 three generations after the Saxon settlements had begun. He was 
 
 reign of Gallienus, which mentions milites vewill. leg. Germanicar. et Britannicin. 
 cum ausciliis em-um. Presumably it is either earlier than the Gallic Empire of 
 258-273, or falls between that and the revolt of Carausius in 287. The notion 
 of O. Fiebiger (Z>e 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. 
 
 ^ The attempt to find eastern British names in Brittany seems a failure. 
 M. de la Borderie, for instance, thinks that Corisopitum (or whatever the exact 
 form of the name is) was colonized from Corstopitum (Corchester on the Tyne, 
 near Hadrian's Wall). But the latter was a tiny unimportant place, while the 
 former has hardly an historical existence at all and may be an ancient error for 
 civitas Goriosolitum (C. xiii (1), i. p. 491). 
 
 * Freeman ( Western Europe in the Fifth Century, p. 164) suggests that a migra- 
 tion 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. I should prefer to omit the agency 
 of Maximus, and to derive Riotamus from the Celtic element in Britain. The 
 evidence alike for Maximus and for the state on the Loire is weak, and the 
 Celtic revival in our islands seems to provide a better setting for the obscure 
 incident. If Prof Bury is right {lAfe of Patrick, p. 354^, Riotamus had a prede- 
 cessor in Dathi, two generations earlier. 
 
32 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 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.* Yet he knew substantially nothing of the history 
 of Britain as a Roman province. He drew from some source now 
 lost to us — possibly an ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical writer — 
 some details of the persecution of Diocletian and of the career of 
 Magnus Maximus.^ For the rest, his ideas of Roman history may 
 be judged by his statement that the two Walls which defended the 
 north of the province — the Walls of Hadrian and Pius — were built 
 somewhere between a. d. 388 and 440. He had some tradition of 
 the coming of the English about 450, and of the reason why they 
 came. But his knowledge of anything previous to that event was 
 plainly most imperfect. 
 
 The Historia Brittonum, compiled a century or two later, preserves 
 even less memory of things Roman. There is some hint of a vettis 
 traditio seniorum. But the narrative which professes to be based on 
 it bears little relation to the actual facts ; the growth of legend is 
 perceptible, and even those details that are borrowed from literary 
 sources like Gildas, Jerome, Prosper, betray great ignorance on the part 
 of the borrower.* 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 supposed to have access to British 
 soiu'ces. Geoffrey of Monmouth — to take only the most famous — 
 asserts that he used a Breton book which told him all manner of facts 
 otherwise unknown. The statement is by no means improbable. 
 But, for all that, the pages of Geoffrey contain no new fact about the 
 
 ' Mommsen, Preface to Gildas (Mon. Germ. Hist.), pp. 9-10. Gildas is, 
 however, rather more Celtic in tone than Mommsen seems to allow. Such 
 a phrase as ita ut non Britannia sed Romania censeretur implies a consciousness 
 of contrast between Briton and Roman. Freeman {Western Europe, p. 166) 
 perhaps puts the case too strongly the other way. 
 
 ' Magnus Maximus, as the opponent of Theodosius, seems to have been 
 damned by the church writers. Compare the phrases of Orosius, vii. 35 (Theo- 
 dosius) posuit in Deo spem suam seseque adversus Maximum tyrannum sola fide 
 maior proripuit and ineffabili iudicio Dei and Theodosius victoriam Deo procurante 
 suscepit. But I confess a doubt as to whether Gildas has not mixed up Magnus 
 Maximus with Constantino. 
 
 ' The story of Vortigern and Hengist now first occurs and is obvious tradition 
 or legend. A prince with a Celtic name may have ruled Kent in 460. There 
 were, indeed, plenty of rulers with barbaric names in the fourth and fifth 
 centuries of the Empire. But the tale cannot be called certain history. 
 
THE ROMANIZATION OF ROMAN BRITAIN 33 
 
 first five centuries which is also true.^ 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." 
 
 But we are moving in a dim land of doubts and shadows. He 
 who wanders here, wanders at his peril, for certainties are few, and 
 that which at one moment seems a fact, is only too likely, as the 
 quest advances, to prove a phantom. It is, too, a borderland, and 
 its explorers need to know something of the regions on both sides of 
 the frontier. I make no claim to that double knowledge. I have 
 merely tried, using such evidence as I can, to sketch the character 
 of one region, that of the Romano-British civilization. 
 
 ' Thus, he refers to "Silch ester, and so good a judge as Stubbs has suggested 
 that for this he had some authority now lost to us. Yet the mere fact that 
 Geoffrey knows only the English name Silchester disproves this idea. Had he 
 used a genuinely ancient authority, he would have (as elsewhere) employed the 
 Roman name. Another explanation may be given. Geoffrey wrote in an anti- 
 quarian 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 accordingly 
 he inserted the place into his story. 
 
 ' The English medieval chronicles have sometimes been supposed to preserve 
 facts otherwise forgotten about Roman times. But, so far as I can judge, this is 
 not the case, even with Henry of Huntingdon. Giraldus Cambrensis, when at 
 Rome, saw some MS. which contained a list of the five provinces of fourth- 
 century Britain — otherwise unknown throughout the Middle Ages {Archaeol. 
 Oxoniensis, p. 224). 
 
 g3 
 
Oxford 
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