wealthy. Samian bowls and rudely coloured
plaster, and even makeshift hypocausts, occur in the cottages of
outlying hamlets. The material civilization of Roman Britain was
definitely and decisively Roman. There was no trace in it of any
national hatred for the products of alien industry or for the
fashions of hated conquerors. The old idea that the Britons remained
apart from the Romans, speaking British, obeying their native
chiefs, living under their native laws, like the Zulus and Maories
of our own Empire, must be discarded. The Celtic law may have been
recognised, like other systems of native law in other provinces. The
great native families may have. kept high social and local position.
But the Celtic elements which survived, survived in harmony with,
and not in contrast to, the Roman civilization. At the end of the
Roman period the Briton could call himself Romanus.
The Romanization, then, was complete, at least in
the lowlands. But it must be further qualified as a Romanisation on
a low scale. The more elaborate features of the Italian
civilization, whether intellectual or administrative or material,
were rare in Britain. The finest products of continental arts and
crafts, in glass and pottery and gold-work, in marble and statuary,
were seldom imported into the island. The Romano-British mosaics,
though numerous enough, are almost always conventional and
undistinguished, and the admiration which they have sometimes
excited is ill-deserved. Romano-British literature was apparently
scanty, and the little that survives of it, such as the fragments of
Pelagius, or the two brief relics of St. Patrick, owe their interest
to quite other reasons than literary excellence. Of organized
municipal or commercial life the remains, though normal in
character, are significantly few. The civilization of Roman Britain
comprised few elements of wealth or splendour.
The two chief local forms of this civilization were the
town and the country-house. The towns of Roman Britain were
comparatively numerous,, but, as we might expect, they were for the
most part small. The highest form of town life known to the Roman
was certainly uncommon in Britain. though commoner there than in
northern Gaul: the colonia and municipia,. the
privileged municipalities possessing Roman franchise and Roman
charters, were represented, so far as we know, by only five
examples, the colonia of Colchester, Lincoln, York, and
Gloucester, and the municipium of Verulam, and none of these
could vie with the greater municipalities of other provinces. They
do not, however, stand alone. London, though it seems never to have
obtained a proper municipal charter, is proved by the witness of
ancient writers, by its own remains, and by its later title Augusta,
to have been large and important. It was, indeed, the seat of the
financial authorities of the province, the commercial capital, and
the centre of the road system of southern Britain. Bath, perhaps
only a spa, was an important spa, famed for its hot springs, its
luxurious bathing establishment, and the splendid temple of its goddess,
Sul Minerva, and attracted visitors even from Gaul. Besides these
more or less definitely Roman creations, there were many places of
varying size which were characterized by town-life and which we may
best describe as country-towns. Many of them appear to have grown
out of Celtic tribal centres of pre-Roman days, like similar
cantonal capitals in northern Gaul. Of such towns we can detect by
reasonable conjecture ten or fifteen examples, of which the best
known are Calleva (Silchester), capital of the Atrebates, |