63 



the ploughshare to take the sword, when they laid aside the 

 sword they would easily resume the ploughshare ; their art was 

 simple and their allotments might be tilled by their own hands. 

 At the same time, the military habits of his former life would 

 make the veteran efficient in a crisis of public danger. The 

 second generation would not be entirely military, though the 

 sons of veterans were liable to be called on for military service, 

 and thus a burgher population, partly Roman and partly 

 British would be formed. 



The supreme jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters was 

 of course vested in the Roman Governor; Roman statesmen 

 were lawyers as well as soldiers. Yet the inhabitants of the 

 principal towns enjoyed a kind of municipal constitution. If 

 we cannot prove this by direct evidence of Eboracum, we may 

 fairly infer it by analogy. The Romans, from the first extension 

 of their conquests beyond the neighbourhood of their city, im- 

 posed a more uniform system of government and administration 

 on their subjects than any other people on record ; and thus 

 showed it to be their vocation, " regere imperio populos." 

 Under the Emperors a Rescript was omnipotent from the 

 Euphrates to the Tagus ; and to no period of ancient history 

 can an argument from analogy be more safely applied. i 



On an altar found at Elenborough, (Olenacum) in Cumber- 

 land, which Horsley says is the finest and most curious ever 

 found in Britain,* it is recorded that Gaius Cornelius Peregrinus, 

 Tribune of the Cohort from the province of Mauritania Caesa- 

 riensis, built or restored (for the verb is omitted) domos et cedem 

 Decurionum. As it could not be the private houses of the 

 Decurions, this must have been their place of meeting and the 

 sedes, a chapel in which they jointly performed some act of 

 worship. We find in another inscription in Horsley,'' mention 

 of a Decurion of the colony of Glevum or Gloucester, who had 

 died at Bath. Since an order of Decurions was found in these 

 two places, we cannot doubt that it existed also at Eboracum, 

 though no monument attests it. The most general distinction 

 of the town population which we meet with on monuments and 



» Brit. Rom. p. 281. « Brit. Bom. p. 327. Somerset 6. 



