earliest period, Londinium, now London. Goods
appear to have been shipped from the Continent direct to London, and
the wrecked cargo of Samian pottery found on the Pan Rock in the
mouth of the Thames estuary (p.163) is doubtless one of the relics
of such traffic. Passengers probably used the short crossing from
Boulogne to Kent, where Richborough was a frequented port, and
Lympne and Dover were used as landing—places. Other routes were
not unknown. Troops seem to have been not seldom sent by a long sea
passage from Fechten or other German port on the Rhine estuary
direct to northern Britain. The discovery of a pig of Mendip lead
near the mouth of the Somme suggests passages across the Channel at
points west of its narrowest portion, and in this, as in other early
ages, there was occasional intercourse between the south-west coast
of Britain and the opposite shore of the Continent.
Lastly, the roads. In considering these we must put out
of our minds the Four Great Roads which are named in one or two
documents and chronicles of the twelfth and succeeding centuries:
Watling Street, Icknield Street, Ermine Street, and Fosse. This
category of Four Roads appears to be an invention of lawyers and
antiquaries utilizing early English road—names which they knew
from charters or otherwise. Certainly Icknield Street, which runs
along the Berkshire downs and the Chilterns, is, for most of its
course, neither Roman in origin nor Roman in use, and the notion of
Four Great Roads is alien to all that we know of the Roman road
system in Britain. In the south and midlands of the province, with
which alone we are here concerned, we can distinguish five roads or
groups of roads. Like the modern railways, which indeed they much
resemble, they radiate principally from London. One road ran
south-east, through Rochester and Canterbury, to the Kentish ports.
A second ran west to Silchester, and thence by various branches to
Winchester and Exeter, to Bath and Gloucester, to Herefordshire and
south Wales. A third, known since Saxon days as Watling Street,
crossed the midlands north-westwards to Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury,
and gave access to the fortress at Chester and to the military
districts of north Wales and northwestern England : by a branch it
also led to Leicester and the north-east. A fourth road ran to
Colchester and the eastern counties, to Lincoln, York, and the
military districts of the north-east. To these four roads, which
start from London, we must add two which do not touch that town, but
which connect the north-east of the province with the south-west:
the Fosse, which joins Lincoln and Leicester with Bath and Exeter,3
and the Rycknield or Icknield Street, a road of somewhat
uncertain course and of very puzzling early English name, which
connects south Yorkshire and Derby with Gloucester-shire. These must
be understood as being the main roads, divested of branches and
intricacies for the sake of clearness, and placed in a category by
themselves. It will be obvious that the province possessed an
adequate supply of internal communications.
Such, in the main, was that large part of Roman Britain
in which ordinary civilized non-military life prevailed: the
lowlands of the south, the east, and the central plain. It was
permeated by the simpler forms of Roman civilization, but it lacked
its higher developments. It was not devoid of
3 For a discussion of the
suggestion that the Fosse may have originated as a Roman
frontier-line in the early years of the conquest, see R. G.
Collingwood, Journal of Roman Studies, xiv, 252. |