ROMANO-BRITISH WORCESTERSHIRE 



racial. Probably the country folk in the remoter parts of Britain 

 continued to speak Celtic during the Roman period : thus much we 

 may infer from various continental analogies and from the revival of the 

 Celtic language in the sixth century. 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 Roman period there 

 was a Late Celtic art of considerable merit, best known for its metal 

 work and earthenware, and distinguished for 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 curiosities ; in general it met the fate of 

 every picturesque but semi-civilized art when con- 

 fronted by an organized coherent culture. Almost 

 every feature in Romano-British life was Roman. 

 The commonest good pottery, the so-called Samian 

 or Terra Sigillata, was copied directly from an Fig. i. Late Celtic 

 Italian original and shows no trace of native influ- O'^'^ament illustrating 



. ° .11 . . ,, . , r 1""^ Returning Spiral. 



ences ; it was mdeed prmcipally 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. The material civilization of Roman Britain comprised 

 few elements of splendour but it was definitely Roman. 



Agreeably to this general character of the province we find town 

 life in it, but not much town life. The highest form of town life known 

 to the Romans is naturally rare. The colonice and municipia, the privileged 

 municipalities with constitutions on the Italian model which mark the 

 supreme development of Roman political civilization in the provinces, 

 were not common in Britain. We know only of five. Colchester, 

 Lincoln, Gloucester and York were colonice, Verulam probably a munici- 

 pium, and despite their legal rank none of these could count among the 

 greater cities of the Empire. Four of them indeed probably owe their 

 existence, not to any development of Britain, but to the need of provid- 

 ing for time-expired soldiers. On the other hand many smaller towns 

 reached some degree of municipal life, of which we cannot precisely 

 specify the character. Originally (as it seems) Celtic tribal centres, they 

 grew into towns just as the tribal centres of northern Gaul grew into 

 towns, under the influence of Roman civilization. They were often 

 small, but their sizes varied widely — from hardly twenty to more than 

 two hundred acres. Strong walls protected them from external assault ; 

 inside, at least in the larger towns a forum built on a Roman plan 

 provided accommodation for magistrates, traders and idlers. Instances 

 of such towns are Silchester and Winchester in Hampshire ; Canterbury 



