A HISTORY OF WARWICKSHIRE 



usually commonplace. Of organized municipal or commercial or admin- 

 istrative life we have but scanty traces. The civilization of Roman 

 Britain was Roman, but it contained few elements of splendour. 



We may distinguish in this civilization two local forms deserving 

 special notice the town and the villa. The towns of Roman Britain 

 were not few, but, as we might expect, they were for the most part 

 small. Scarcely any seems to have attained very great size, according 

 to the standard of the empire. The highest form of town life known 

 to the Roman was certainly rare in Britain : the colonlce and municipia, 

 the privileged municipalities with the Roman franchise and constitutions 

 on the Italian model, were represented, so far as we know, only by five 

 examples, the colonies of Colchester, Lincoln, and Gloucester and York, 

 and the municlpium of Verulamium, and none of these could vie with the 

 greater municipalities of other provinces. Of other towns, probably 

 inferior in rank, there was more abundance, especially in the south and 

 east of Britain. These varied greatly in size. The larger ones, like Sil- 

 chester or Canterbury or Chichester, had walls to defend themselves, and a 

 forum built on the Roman plan and providing accommodation for magis- 

 trates, traders and idlers ; these towns doubtless possessed some form of 

 municipal life and may be described as country towns. Others were 

 smaller in various degrees, and in some cases, which will concern us in 

 Warwickshire, it is hard, on defective evidence, to decide whether we 

 ought to use the word ' town ' at all. 



Outside these towns the country seems to have been principally 

 divided up into estates usually called ' villas,' and in this respect, as in 

 many other points, Britain resembled northern Gaul. The 'villa' was 

 the property of a large landowner who lived in the ' great house ' if 

 there was one, cultivated the land immediately round it (the demesne) 

 by his slaves and let the rest to half-serf coloni. The estates formed for 

 the most part sheep runs and corn land, and supplied the cloth and 

 wheat which are occasionally mentioned by ancient writers as products 

 of the province during the later Imperial period. The landowners may 

 have been to some extent immigrant Italians, but it can hardly be 

 doubted that, as in Gaul, they were mostly the Romanized nobles and 

 upper classes of the natives. The common assertion that they were 

 Roman officers or officials may be set aside as rarely if ever correct. 

 The peasantry who worked on these estates or were otherwise occupied 

 in the country lived in rude hamlets, sometimes in pit-dwellings, some- 

 times in huts, with few circumstances of comfort or pleasure. Their 

 civilization however, as we have said, was Roman in all such matters 

 as the better objects in common use or the warming and decoration of 

 the houses. 



One feature, not a prominent one, remains to be noticed trade 

 and industry. We should perhaps place first the large farming industry, 

 which produced wheat and wool. Both were exported in the fourth 

 century, and the export of wheat to the towns of the lower Rhine is 

 mentioned by an ancient writer as considerable. Unfortunately the 



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