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CHAPTER

INDEX

FIG.

Head of Gorgon from Bath. Frontispiece

THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE

Historians seldom 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. 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 untravelled 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 born of such things were denied to the Empire. Its temperament was neither artistic, nor literary, nor scientific. It was merely practical.

Their efforts took two forms, the organization of the frontier defences which repulsed the barbarian, and the development of the provinces within those defences. The first of these achievements was but for a time. In the end the 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 strong root. The fact has an importance which we to-day might easily miss. It is not likely that any modern nation will soon again stand in the place that Rome then held. Our culture to-day seems firmly planted in three continents and our task is rather to diffuse it further and to develop its good qualities than to defend it. But the Roman Empire was the civilized world; the safety of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside was the wild chaos of barbarism. Rome kept it back from end to end of Europe and across a thousand miles of western Asia. Through all the storms of barbarian onset, through the carnage of uncounted wars, through plagues which struck whole multitudes down to a disastrous death, through civil discord and sedition and domestic treachery, the work went on. It was not always marked by special insight or intelligence. The men who carried it out were not for the most part first-rate statesmen or first-rate generals. Their successes were those of character, not of genius. But their phlegmatic courage saved the civilized life of Europe till that life had grown strong and tenacious, and till even its assailants had recognized its worth.

It was this growth of internal civilization which formed the second and most lasting of the achievements of the Empire. Its long and peaceable government--the longest and most orderly that has yet been granted to any large portion of the world--gave time for the expansion of Roman speech and manners, for the extension of the political franchise, the establishment of city life, the assimilation of the provincial populations in an orderly and coherent civilization. As the importance of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large part of the world grew to be Roman. It has been said that Greece taught men to be human and Rome made mankind civilized. That was the work of the Empire; the form it took was Romanization.

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, 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 over Pole, where the individualities of two kindred and similarly civilized races clash in undying conflict. The Roman conquest of western Europe resembled neither of these. Celt, Iberian, German, Illyrian, 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 African 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 indirectly, 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. Round 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 Italy, 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.

In material culture the Romanization advanced no less quickly. One uniform fashion spread from the Mediterranean throughout central and western Europe, driving out native art and substituting a conventionalized copy of Graeco-Roman or Italian art, which is characterized alike by its technical finish and neatness, and by its lack of originality and its dependence on imitation. The result was inevitable. The whole external side of life was lived amidst Italian, or Roman-provincial, furniture and environment. Take by way of example the development of the so-called 'Samian' ware. The original manufacture of this was in Italy at Arezzo. Early in the first century Gaulish potters began to copy and compete with it; before long the products of the Arretine kilns had vanished even from the Italian market. Western Europe henceforward was supplied with its 'best china' from provincial and mainly from Gaulish sources. The character of the ware supplied is significant. It was provincial, but it was in no sense unclassical. It drew many of its details from other sources than Arezzo, but it drew them all from Greece or Rome. Nothing either in the manner or in the matter of its decoration recalled native Gaul. Throughout, it is imitative and conventional, and, as often happens in a conventional art, items are freely jumbled together which do not fit into any coherent story or sequence. At its best, it is handsome enough: though its possibilities are limited by its brutal monochrome, it is no discredit to the civilization to which it belongs. But it reveals unmistakably the Roman character of that civilization.

The uniformity of this civilization was crossed by local variations, but these do not contradict its Roman character. If the provincial 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 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 they signify the birth of new Roman fashions.

It remains true, of course, that, till a language or a custom is wholly dead and gone, it can always revive under special conditions. The rustic poor of a country seldom affect the trend of its history. But they have a curious persistent force. Superstitions, sentiments, even language and the consciousness of nationality, linger dormant among them, till an upheaval comes, till buried seeds are thrown out on the surface and forgotten plants blossom once more. The world has seen many examples of such resurrection--not least in modern Europe. The Roman Empire offers us singularly few instances, but it would be untrue to say that there were none.

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, at 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.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON ROMAN BRITAIN

Secondly, 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 hardly 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 sort.

And lastly, 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, like a man whose constitution is sound rather than strong, might perish quickly from a violent shock.

ROMANIZATION IN LANGUAGE

We may now proceed to survey the actual remains. They may seem scanty, but they deserve examination.

I have heard this conclusion doubted on the ground that a bricklayer or domestic servant in a province of the Roman Empire would not have known how to read and write. This doubt really rests on a misconception of the Empire. It is, indeed, akin to the surprise which tourists often exhibit when confronted with Roman remains in an excavation or a museum--a surprise that 'the Romans' had boots, or beds, or waterpipes, or fireplaces, or roofs over their heads. There are, in truth, abundant evidences that the labouring man in Roman days knew how to read and write at need, and there is much truth in the remark that in the lands ruled by Rome education was better under the Empire than at any time since its fall till the nineteenth century.

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 that the Britons, who had hitherto hated and refused the foreign tongue, became eager to speak it fluently. About the same time 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. Forty years later, Juvenal alludes casually to British lawyers taught by Gaulish schoolmasters. It is plain that by the second century Latin must have been spreading 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. Trustworthy 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.

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

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.

We find Roman influence even in the most secluded villages of the upland region. At Din Lligwy, on the northeast coast of Anglesea, recent excavation has uncovered the ruins of a village enclosure about three-quarters of an acre in extent, containing round and square huts or rooms, with walls of roughly coursed masonry and roofs of tile. Scattered up and down in it lay hundreds of fragments of Samian and other Roman or Romano-British pottery and a far smaller quantity of ruder pieces, a few bits of Roman glass, some Roman coins of the period A.D. 250-350, various iron nails and hooks, querns, bones, and so forth. The place lies on the extreme edge of the British province and on an island where no proper Roman occupation can be detected, while its ground-plan shows little sign of a Roman influence. Yet the smaller objects and perhaps also the squareness of one or two rooms show that even here, in the later days of the Empire, the products of Roman civilization and the external fabric of Roman provincial life were present and almost predominant.

ROMANIZATION IN ART

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 T?ne or Late Celtic or whatever it be styled--was common to all the Celtic lands 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 this particular Empire. All native arts, however beautiful, 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 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 brooches with Celtic affinities made near Brough in Westmorland, and the New Forest urns with their curious leaf ornament , 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 Romano-British settlements of comfortable houses, furnished in genuine Roman style. Round them were extensive pottery works. The ware, or at least the most characteristic of the wares, made in these works is generally known as Castor or Durobrivian ware. Castor was not, indeed, its only place of manufacture. It was produced freely in northern Gaul, and possibly elsewhere 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 is based, indeed, on classical elements, foliated scrolls, hunting scenes, and occasionally mythological representations . But it recasts these elements with the vigour of a true art and in accordance with its special tendencies. Those fantastic animals with strange out-stretched 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 scenes in which man is specially prominent--a hunt, or a gladiatorial show, or Hesione fettered naked 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. 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 important British work which is Celtic, or at least un-Roman . The Spa at Bath contained a stately temple to Sul or Sulis Minerva, goddess of the waters. The pediment of this temple, partly preserved by a lucky accident and unearthed in 1790, 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, a standard , and a 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 properly female type. For our present purpose the important fact is that he could do it. Here is proof that, once at least, the supremacy of the dominant conventional art of the Empire could be rudely broken down.

A third example, also from sculpture, is supplied by the Corbridge Lion, found among the ruins of Corstopitum in Northumberland in 1907 . It is a sculpture in the round showing nearly a life-sized lion standing above his prey. The scene is common in provincial Roman work, and not least in Gaul and Britain. Often it is connected with graves, sometimes it served for the ornament of a fountain. But if the scene is common, the execution of it is not. Artistically, indeed, the piece is open to criticism. The lion is not the ordinary beast of nature. His face, the pose of his feet, the curl of his tail round his hind leg, are all untrue to life. The man who carved him knew perhaps more of dogs than lions. But he fashioned a living animal. Fantastic and even grotesque as it is, his work possesses a wholly unclassical fierceness and vigour, and not a few observers have remarked when seeing it that it recalls not the Roman world but the Middle Ages.

The facts which I have tried to set forth in the preceding paragraphs seem to me to possess more weight than is always allowed. Some writers, for instance M. Loth, speak as if the external environment 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. 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.

ROMANIZATION IN THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND-SYSTEM

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 or noble--and though we have no further 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 municipalities, they account only for a part of the province.

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ROMANIZATION

Thirty years later Agricola, who was obviously a better administrator than a general, openly encouraged the process. According 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. Agricola appears to have been merely carrying out the policy of his age. Certainly it is just at this period that towns like Silchester, Bath, Caerwent, seem to take definite shape, and civil judges were appointed, presumably to administer the justice more frequently required by the advancing civilization. In A.D. 85 it was thought safe to reduce the garrison by a legion and some auxiliaries. Progress, however, was not maintained. About 115-20, and again about 155-63 and 175-80, the northern part of the province was vexed by serious risings, and the civilian area was doubtless kept somewhat in disturbance. Probably it was at some point in this period that the flourishing country town of Isurium , 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, not only coins, but also pottery of the first century are infrequent, and many sites have yielded nothing earlier than about 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 and farms inhabited during the years A.D. 280-350 must have been very large. Prosperity culminated, perhaps, in the Constantinian 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, and, indeed, as late as 360, 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.

No golden age lasts long. Before 350, probably in 343, Constans had to cross the Channel and repel the Picts and other assailants. After 368 such aid was more often and more urgently required. Significantly enough, the lists of coins found in some country-houses close about 350-60, while others remained occupied till about 385 or even later. The rural districts, it is plain, began then to be no longer safe; 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 406-7 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 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 . 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.

THE SEQUEL, THE CELTIC REVIVAL IN THE LATER EMPIRE

So far we have considered the province of Britain as it was 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 occur in the later British language, and some at least of these may be traceable to the Roman occupation of the island. Roman military terms appear, if scantily. Roman inscriptions are occasionally set up. The Romanization of Britain was plainly no mere interlude, which passed without leaving a mark behind. But it was crossed by two hostile forges, 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 influences in favour of a Celtic revival. And they were all the more potent because, in or even before the period under discussion, the opening of the fifth century, a Celtic migration seems to have set in from the Irish coasts. The details of this migration are unknown, and the few traces which survive of it are faint and not altogether intelligible. 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. 265-70--though there does not seem to be any very good reason for it--the Dessi or D?isi were expelled from Meath and a part of them settled in the 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 Professor Bury suggests, with the consent of the Imperial Government and under conditions of service. But we are entirely ignorant whether these exiles from Ireland numbered tens or scores or hundreds, and this uncertainty renders speculation dangerous. If the newcomers were few and their new homes were in the remote west beyond Carmarthen , formal consent would hardly have been required. 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 , which was discovered in the excavations of 1893. The circumstances of the discovery show that this pillar belongs to the very latest period in the history of Calleva. Its inscription is Goidelic: that is, it does not belong to the ordinary Callevan population, which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best explained 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, and perhaps a good many years before, A.D. 500. In any case, an Ogam monument had been set up before it occurred, and the presence of such an object would seem to prove that Celtic things had made their way even into this eastern Romanized town.

But a more powerful aid to the revival may be found in another fact--that is the destruction of the Romanized part of Britain by the invading Saxons. War, and especially defensive war against invaders, must always weaken the higher forms of any country's civilization. Here the agony was long, and the assailants cruel and powerful, 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. Moreover, 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 East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, some of the most thickly populated and highly civilized parts of Britain, against the pirates by a series of forts which extended from the Wash to Spithead, and were known as the forts of the Saxon Shore. Fifty or seventy years later the raiders, whether English seamen or Picts and Scots from Caledonia and Ireland, devastated the coasts of the province and perhaps reached even the midlands. When, 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 were stormed and left desolate, the very centres of Romanized life were extinguished. Not a single one remained an inhabited town. Destruction fell even on Canterbury, where the legends tell of intercourse between Briton or Saxon, and on London, where ecclesiastical writers fondly place fifth- and sixth-century bishops. Both sites lay empty and untenanted for many years. Only in the far west, at Exeter or at Caerwent, does our evidence allow us to guess at a continuing Romano-British life.

The same destruction came also on the population. During the long series of disasters, many of the Romanized inhabitants of the lowland regions must have perished. Many must have fallen into 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. As it was, 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 altogether infrequent or insignificant, were unevenly distributed. 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 , one Artorius Justus, was sent with a part of the British garrison to reduce it to obedience. It may therefore have been, as Mommsen suggests, one of the least Romanized corners of Gaul, and in it the native idiom may have retained unusual vitality. Yet that native speech was not strong enough to live on permanently. The Celtic which is spoken to-day in Brittany is not a Gaulish but a British Celtic; it is the result of British influences. Brittany would have sooner or later become assimilated to the general Romano-Gaulish civilization, had not its Celtic elements won fresh strength from immigrant Britons. 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 their names, came from Devon and Cornwall, and some certainly did not come as fugitives. The King Riotamus who 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.

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.

INDEX

Aldborough , 56.

Arretine pottery, 15.

Bath, 42, 56.

Brittany, migration to, 65.

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