A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE 



and Rochester in Kent ; Dorchester and Exeter, Cirencester, Leicester, 

 and far in the north Aldborough in the Vale of York. 



Outside these towns the country seems to have been principally 

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

 Britain resembled northern Gaul. The ' villa ' was the property of a 

 large landowner who lived in the ' great house ' if there was one, cul- 

 tivated 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 occa- 

 sionally 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 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, sometimes 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 agricultural 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 

 details of this agriculture are almost unknown : perhaps we shall be able 

 to estimate it better when the Romano-British ' villas ' have been better 

 explored. Rather more traces have survived of the lead mining and 

 iron mining, which at least during the first two centuries of our era was 

 carried on with some vigour in half a dozen districts — lead on Mendip, 

 in Shropshire, Flintshire and Derbyshire ; iron in the Weald and the 

 Forest of Dean. Other minerals were less important. The gold men- 

 tioned by Tacitus proved very scanty, and the far-famed Cornish tin 

 seems (according to present evidence) to have been worked comparatively 

 little and late in the Roman occupation. The chief commercial town 

 was from the earliest times Londinium (London), a place of some size 

 and wealth, and perhaps the residence of the chief authorities who 

 controlled taxes and customs dues. 



Finally let us sketch the roads. We may distinguish four groups 

 all commencing from one centre, London. One road ran south-east to 

 Canterbury and the Kentish ports. A second ran west and south-west 

 from London to Silchester, and thence by ramifications to Winchester, 

 Dorchester and Exeter, Bath, Gloucester and South Wales. A third, 

 Watling Street, ran north-west across the Midlands to Wroxeter, and 

 thence to the military districts of the north-west ; it also gave access to 

 Leicester and the north. A fourth ran to Colchester and the eastern 

 counties, and also to Lincoln and York and the mihtary districts of the 



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