ROMANO-BRITISH WARWICKSHIRE 



In the first place, Britain like all the provinces of the western 

 Empire became Romanized. Perhaps its Romanization was com- 

 paratively late in date and imperfect in extent. But in the end the 

 Britons generally adopted the Roman speech and civilization, and in 

 our island, as in all western Europe, the difference between Roman and 

 provincial practically vanished. When the Roman rule in Britain ended 

 (about A.D. 410), the so-called departure of the Romans did not mean 

 what the end of English rule in India or French rule in Algeria would 

 mean to-day. It was not an emigration of alien officials, soldiers and 

 traders ; it was more administrative than racial. The gap between 

 Briton and Roman, visible enough in the first century, had become 

 obliterated by the fourth century. Probably the country folk in the 

 remoter parts of Britain continued to speak some Celtic during the 

 Roman period. But the townspeople and the educated seem to have 

 used Latin, and on the side of material civilization the Roman element 

 reigns supreme. Before the Claudian invasion there existed in our 

 island a Late Celtic art of considerable merit, best 

 known for its metal work and earthenware, and dis- 

 tinguished by its fantastic use of plant and animal 

 forms, its employment of the ' returning spiral ' (fig. 

 i), and its enamelling. This art and the culture 

 which went with it vanished before the Roman. 

 In a few places, as in the New Forest, its products 

 survived as local manufactures ; in general it met 

 the fate of every picturesque but semi-civilized art FIG. i. LATE CELTIC 

 when confronted by an organized and coherent cul- ORNAMENT ILLUSTRATING 



. ,. T THE RETURNING SPIRAL. 



ture. Almost every important feature in Romano- 

 British life was Roman. The commonest good pottery, the so-called 

 Samian or Terra Sigillata, was copied directly from an Italian original 

 and shows no trace of native influences ; it was indeed principally 

 imported from abroad. The mosaic pavements and painted stuccoes 

 which adorned the houses, the hypocausts which warmed them, and the 

 bathrooms which increased their luxury, were equally borrowed from 

 Italy. Nor were these features confined to the mansions of the wealthy. 

 Samian bowls and coarsely coloured plaster and makeshift hypocausts 

 occur even in outlying hamlets. 1 



But though the Romanization was thus tolerably complete, it must 

 be further qualified as a Romanization on a low scale. The more 

 elaborate and wealthy features of the Italian civilization, whether 

 material or intellectual or administrative, were rare or unknown in 

 Britain. The finest objects of continental manufacture in glass and 

 pottery and gold-work came rarely to the island, and the objects of local 

 fabric rarely attained a high degree of merit. The choicer marbles and 

 the finer statuary are still rarer, and the Romano-British mosaics are 



1 Compare R. Colt Hoare, Ancient Wilts, Roman jEra, p. 127 : 'On some of the highest of our 

 [Wiltshire] downs I have found stuccoed and painted walls as well as hypocausts introduced into the rude 

 ^ t dements of the Britons.' The discoveries of the late General Pitt-Rivers fully confirm this. 



I 225 29 



