ROMANO-BRITISH WARWICKSHIRE 



than now, and the little valleys less carefully drained. It is not hard 

 to understand why the midlands should have possessed a less richly 

 developed civilization than many other parts of the Roman province of 

 Britain. 



This characteristic of Roman Warwickshire has been generally 

 but not always very accurately recognized. For the recognition has 

 been commonly accompanied by errors which tend to obscure the truth 

 and which deserve correction. Two quotations from previous writers 

 on Warwickshire will illustrate these errors and serve our purpose. The 

 first quotation is from one of the most famous of our county histories, 

 John Nichols' Leicestershire : 



Arden was an extensive wild, solely appropriated to the pasturage of the Cor- 

 navian and Huiccian cattle, attended by their keepers, the Ceangi of the different 

 tribes. If we except a few hovels for the herdsmen, there were at that time no other 

 habitations save at some of those stations on the roads going through the Arden 

 (iv. 1028). 



The Cornavian and Huiccian cattle and the herdsmen Ceangi are all 

 pure inventions, due originally to the fertile brain of William Baxter 

 and expanded by later writers. 1 We have no evidence that the Cornavii 

 lived in Warwickshire ; the Huiccii were not a British tribe at all, and 

 the Ceangi were not herdsmen but a tribe occupying what is now Flint- 

 shire. The one thing that is true in the passage is the general view 

 that the district was thinly populated, and even this is distorted out of 

 its true setting by the added errors. 



A second quotation from a modern description of the county will 

 exemplify a different conception of the subject, which is free from the 

 definite errors of that just quoted, but is not itself correct : 



The Roman occupation of this part of the Midlands appears to have been only 

 partial and chiefly limited to the camps along their roads, as the native tribes were 

 enabled by the natural characteristics of the thickly wooded district, which afforded 

 a secure ambush, to offer considerable resistance to the invaders. 



This may have been true of the first ten or twenty years after the 

 original conquest, while the land was still unquiet and resistance still 

 rife. But a brief reflection will show that it cannot be true as a 

 description applicable to three and a half centuries. Such a situation 

 would quickly have been felt intolerable in the heart of a generally 

 civilized country. Moreover the actual remains found in Warwickshire, 

 which we shall now proceed to survey, give us no hint of roads per- 

 manently fortified by blockhouses and forests permanently occupied by 

 unconquered natives. They indicate, on the contrary, a normal and 

 peaceful life, which probably differed from the ordinary civilization of 

 Britain only in the scantiness of population and the lack of prominent 

 and distinctive features. Our next section, dealing with possible towns 

 and villages, will immediately illustrate this. 



1 Baxter, Gloisarium Aniiquitatum Britannicarum (London, 1709), p. 73. 



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