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A number of details were given showing the working 
of the posting system, which was brought to a high degree 
of perfection. The changes were next described that must 
have taken place in the military system, consequent on the 
revolt of Carausius: and the evidence of coins shows that 
the re-conquest of Britain by Constantine was not a complete 
one; the mining district of the Forest of Dean, excepting 
Lydney affording no sign of occupation, later than that of the 
Carausian period. 
Passing on to the withdrawal of the Roman Government 
from Britain in the fifth century, J. Bellows showed how the 
system they had left determined the forms of the one that 
followed it; the autonomy of great towns like Gloucester 
enduring through the several changes of Saxon and Norman 
occupation: while in the country districts the larger Villas, 
which under a settled government needed no other protection 
than that of the law, would in the period of unrest only retain 
their existence by fortifying themselves and becoming “ moated 
granges,” of which we still have so many traces. 
The part of the paper which ‘elicited the most discussion 
was that in which J. Bellows inferred a very large effect on the 
composition of the nationality of the English people from the 
number of troops sent here and maintained here from the 
Continent. In Professor Hiibner’s Rémische Heer in Britannien, 
there is a summary given of some 90 different Cohorts or Alae 
or other military bodies, concerning whose connection with 
Britain we have epigraphic or other evidence; and John Bellows 
maintained that if we take into account the Roman system of 
deportation of the young men, natives of this Island, for foreign 
military service, while for hundreds of years bodies of men of 
nearly every nationality in Europe settled here in permanence, 
we cannot but see that the parentage of the British people 
must have been largely affected by the mingling of such 
nationalities with the Celtic stock inhabiting the Island. 
The paper was illustrated at several points by diagrams 
and the use of the black board. 
