ROMANO-BRITISH NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



Roman days some faint traditions of the old native Celtic art. In short, 

 the antiquities of our county present to us, fully and freely, the features 

 which characterized the ordinary settled life of Roman Britain, and they 

 add one feature which is less usual, the survival of Celtic traditions in art. 

 We have before us a typical area, varying only in one small individual 

 trait. But to these details, which exemplify the permanent and regular 

 life of the district as it was through two or three centuries, we must 

 append one more of a different nature. We shall not be able to conclude 

 our survey without noticing some vestiges — partly real, partly (I fear) 

 imaginary — of the military operations by which Roman Britain was first 

 conquered. These vestiges are not characteristic of the district : their 

 presence in it is accidental, and their date is a special and transitory 

 period. Therefore we place them at the end of our survey, outside the 

 limits of the normal civilization which we shall first describe. 



This normal civilization however was not equally developed over 

 all parts of Northamptonshire. The eastern end of the county differed 

 markedly in this respect from the centre and west. In the east we find 

 something like a real town, a flourishing industry, and signs of wealth 

 and luxury. In the centre and west the towns are hardly more than 

 villages, and evidences of high civilization are scanty. This is not mere 

 chance. The eastern part of our county belongs to the region of the 

 fens and the hills adjoining them ; the west and centre belong to the 

 midlands, and in the Roman period the civilization of the midlands was 

 lower than that of the surrounding districts. In the latter we meet 

 striking developments of Romano-British life ; for instance, a ring of 

 country towns, Verulam, Chesterford, Castor, Wroxeter, Gloucester, 

 Cirencester, Silchester, each in its degree a place of note. The midland 

 area contained no such elements. Except Leicester, its towns were far 

 too small to be matched with any of those just named ; indeed, they are 

 hardly towns at all, and the whole Romano-British life of the region 

 was simple and plain, and devoid of character and salient features. The 

 reason for this may perhaps be found in physical facts. The midlands, 

 though often described by geographers as the central plain of our island, 

 are not in reality a plain in the ordinary sense of that word. They form 

 a complex district which is especially notable for the low scale and small 

 size of its various physical features. Little of it is flat, but it has no 

 high hills or distinct ranges. Woods abound in it, but there are no 

 continuous tracts of forest. Many rivers rise within it, but they reach 

 no size till they have passed its borders ; their valleys are small and 

 shallow, and even their watersheds are faint and ill-defined. It is a 

 pleasant land, alike to those that dwell in it and those that wander 

 through it, but it contains very httle that might aid the growth of 

 large towns or of an extensive agricultural population. Its mineral 

 wealth attracts a dense throng of inhabitants to one part of it to-day, but 

 that wealth was unknown in the Roman period. Then too the woods 

 were perhaps thicker than now, and the little valleys less carefully 

 drained. It is not hard to understand why the midlands, and among 



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