natural resources, but it was not wealthy. It was
a land of small towns an prosperous rural estates, remote from the
splendours and the troubles of the Mediterranean, comfortable,
unimportant.
If we turn now to Kent, we shall find, as we might
expect, that the geographical and geological features of the county
explain the distribution the Roman settled sites there. Almost the
whole of the central area consist of high chalk downs which, to a
large extent treeless and waterless, were no favoured by the more
Romanised elements in the population. Whether, and how far, they
(like the Sussex downs) supported native village groups we do not at
present know; but it is certain that, for the mansions and farmhouse
of the more prosperous inhabitants of the county, we must look
rather to the flanks than to the ridges of the downlands. There, on
the south, the fertile sandy clay of the gault from Folkestone to
Maidstone and Sevenoaks carried a fairly extensive series of
‘villas‘ and other settlements. To the north between the downs
and the sea, a fringe of lightly wooded sands attracted first, the
great arterial Watling Street, and, secondly, a continuous chain of
towns and ‘ villas ‘ from Richborough to Canterbury and London.
These two zones of habitation are joined towards ‘the west by two
transverse valleys—those of the Medway and the Dart—along both
of which flowed the tide of Roman occupation. Beyond all these
regions, to the south the great forest of the Weald, 120 miles in
length and over 20 in breadth, formed a natural barrier to which
Kent has at more than one period owed both isolation and
independence. In Roman times this forest-belt constituted a hiatus
in the occupation of the countryside, but, save perhaps in the
fourth century, formed, so far as we know, no sort of political or
cultural frontier.4
Nevertheless, however undesirable for permanent
habitation , the chalk downs had one sterling merit. They offered an
expanse of convenient open country towards the three natural ports
of south-eastern Britain. To the south, Lymne or Lympne, now long
cut off from the sea, then afforded sheltered anchorage which was
readily linked with Canterbury to the north-ward by the long,
straight Stane Street. At Dover, the Dour cut its way through
cliffs which at that time flanked a now-vanished haven. To the
north, the Wansum, which then, as a navigable strait, cleft the
chalk plateau of Thanet from the mainland, offered at both ends
—but particularly towards the south, at Richborough convenient
inlets where a fleet might ride at anchor. At all these
points harbour—towns, linked with Canterbury by a rigid framework
of roads, came into being during the early years of the occupation.
And it was inevitable that, at all these points, in the latter days
when Saxon pirates came thrusting into our south—eastern shores,
fortresses should spring up to guard the gateways to the province.
Since this chain of harbours was thus the dominant Imperial interest
in Kent, we may justly begin our detailed survey with them.
4 In the quadruple
subdivision of Roman Britain after A.D. 296 Britannia Secunda may
have coincided roughly with Kent, but our only evidence is
Giraldus Cambrensis, writing about A.D. 1205. (See F. Haverfield, Archaeologia
Oxoniensis, 1892— 5 , p .223.) |