although they may well have been concentrated in
the more attractive portions of these natural clearings, while
woodland, valley swamp, and bleaker hills remained comparatively
empty, there is also ample evidence of them in the valleys, on the
gravel banks of streams and rivers. For example, a hamlet examined,
though not fully excavated, by Professor Haverfield showed similar,
but ruder, features. It lay close to the Thames, at Northfield Farm
between Abingdon and the Oxfordshire Dorchester, and consisted of
largish circular and rectangular inclosures among which lay
fragments of wattle and daub walling, rudely coloured wall-plaster,
and roof-tiles and slates. Indications of similar sites have been
noticed at nine or ten places in the neighbourhood, and it is
probable that a row of hamlets occupied by peasants filled this part
of the Thames valley. Similar hamlets abound along the river banks
of Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, and Bedfordshire. Here we find
hamlets planted in no obvious relation to any known country houses,
and we cannot determine the position in which their inhabitants
stood to the wealthy owners of large country seats. If the
‘villa’ system obtained in what is now Dorset or Oxfordshire, we
might place the coloni in such hamlets.
The local government of the province was left,
according to Roman custom, to local authorities. We can distinguish
three units of administration. The five municipalities mentioned
above each possessed and ruled a territory of its own, which may
have been as large as an average English county. The Imperial
Domains also formed independent areas under Imperial officials.
Their extent in Britain is uncertain. Perhaps they were smaller here
than in many other provinces, but the mines were normally Imperial
property, and some slight traces occur of other Imperial estates.
The rest of the land— presumably the larger part of it—was left
to tribal or cantonal authorities. These authorities represented the
native chiefs and nobles of pre-Roman days. But they bore sway under
Roman forms and titles; they were often styled duoviri, like
true municipal magistrates, and their local council was called ordo,
like the municipal senate. We may suppose that this council and
the magistrates ruled both the cantonal area and its chief
town—that, for instance, the ordo of the civitas
Atrebatum, the canton of the Atrebates, administered both the
cantonal area and the chief town, Calleva Atrebatum. If this
assumption is correct, the local government of Britain resembled
that of northern Gaul. But the cantons were smaller and less
important in Britain than in Gaul, and have left fewer clear traces
of their existence.
One feature, not a prominent one, remains to be
noticed—trade and industry. Here the first place is due to the
agrarian industry of the landed estates which yielded wheat and wool
in sufficient quantities to be exported to Gaul and even farther.
This industry must have provided their occupations for the larger
part of the population and their incomes for the landowners. Mining
was also pursued actively in some districts during at least the
first two centuries of the Empire. Lead was sought in Somerset, in
Shropshire, in Flintshire, in Derbyshire, and iron in the Sussex
Weald and the Gloucester-shire Forest of Dean. But the gold
mentioned by Tacitus proved very scanty and employed only a few
miners in the Welsh hills, while the far-famed Cornish tin seems,
according to present evidence, to have been worked comparatively
little and late. The chief commercial town was, from the |