Particularly in regard to its influence on the County of Wilts. 203 
habits of the people were left unbroken, and were only emphasised 
anew by the West Saxon invaders. Our virtues and our defects are 
matters of long and steady growth, and he who would work in 
Wiltshire must take this into account. Conservative for good and 
evil, friendly but somewhat undemonstrative—such L suppose were 
the Belge, such are the Wiltshiremen. 
Since writing this paper I have been much interested to hear of 
the excavations in the Wansdyke in Calstone parish and on the Tan 
Hill side of Shepherds Shore recently made by General Pitt-Rivers, 
with his usual conscientious care and careful registration of results. 
The discovery of Samian ware and oyster shells under the banks of the 
dyke seems to show that the work is Roman or post-Roman rather 
than pre-Roman and Belgic. It had occurred to me in writing my 
paper, though I had not time to put the conjecture into plausible 
shape, that the Wansdyke was a Roman work, probably executed 
by Ostorius Scapula, to protect the first province of Britain, which, 
as we have seen, apparently contained the country of the Belge, the 
Atrebates, and the Regni. If General Pitt-Rivers’s discovery be 
substantiated, though our antiquaries may lose a pre- Roman monu- 
ment, they may gain one which will enable us to rival in interest 
the classic ground of Northumberland and Cumberland. It is 
natural to suppose that the compendious sentence of Tacitus already 
quoted, “ Cuncta castris cis Antonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere 
parat”’ (he makes preparations to keep in check the whole country 
on this side—.e., on the east !—of the rivers Anton and Severn by 
the construction of camps) refers not only to a chain of military 
‘stations, but to the vallum of the Wansdyke, parallel as it is in 
great part of its course to the road from Calleva to the Bristol 
Channel, which, as we have seen, possesses in our county old 
1The Romans not improbably thought that the axis of our island ran more 
§.W. to N.E. than it actnally does, and therefore cis might almost be paraphrased 
“to the south of,” It is remarkable that the ‘‘ provincia inferior’ seems to have 
included the eastern part of the island, and the “superior” the western, the 
modern Wales. York, for instance, was apparently in the “lower province” as 
well as London, 
