Brief Notes for the Visit of the 



Dorset Field Club to the Fifehead Neville Villa, 



Sept. 22nd, 1903. 



By the Rev. G. H. ENGLEHEART, M.A., F.S.A. 



A " Roman Villa." 



lOTH parts of the term " Roman Villa" have caused 

 some misconception of the character of the 

 buildings which go by this name. The popular 

 notion has been that they were the residences, 

 foreign in construction and built for more or less 

 temporary convenience, of foreign officials during 

 a military occupation. But during the two 

 centuries in which they were inhabited, a.d. 100 to 400, to use 

 round numbers, the districts of Britain which they covered, the 

 South and the Midlands, were entirely peaceful. It was the way 

 of Rome to reduce a country with a strong hand, and, this once 

 done, to allow large internal liberty — 



" debellare superbos . . . pacis imponere morem 

 . . . parcere subjectis." 

 After the close of the ist century there were but four legions 

 left in Britain, and of these three were in the north and one on 

 the Welsh border. It has been observed that the small bodies of 

 auxiliaries of which we find traces in the south were inadequate 

 to have been meant as a curb on the population. Some of the 

 villas, no doubt, belonged to officials connected with the 



