BEGINNINGS OF TOWN-LIFE IN BRITAIN 513 



an interdependence and coherence amongst them which Hfts them out 

 of the parochialism of a mere peasant kraal. 



But it is on the downs of Wessex and amongst the foot-hills of the 

 Welsh border, in a country unknown to Cassar, that the most obvious and 

 dramatic vestiges of our pre-Roman communities have survived ; and 

 here too — in Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Gloucestershire and 

 elsewhere — exploration has proceeded at an unprecedented pace in recent 

 years. This is not the context for a detailed discussion of these investiga- 

 tions. It will sufHce to observe the number of the sites and to glance 

 at certain characteristic features of them. Between central Hampshire 

 and eastern Devon alone there are still upwards of seventy Iron Age 

 fortified settlements, of which half at least are of considerable size relative 

 to the population of the period. Many of them were permanently 

 occupied, with houses and streets, sheltered by massive lines of rampart 

 and ditch, the construction of which implies no small degree of wealth 

 and authority and skill. What are now merely turf-grown mounds are 

 known to have had originally the dignity of timber or masonry revetment ; 

 the summits of the main ramparts were, in some cases at least, reinforced 

 fighting-platforms, and towers or built strong-points rose here and there 

 amongst the outworks, that the slingers, who formed the principal fighting 

 force, might control the approaches. The monumental Maiden Castle 

 of Dorset, for instance, stood like some provincial Mycen« of the down- 

 lands, appropriately known to Ptolemy's informants, it seems, as Duniiim, 

 The Dun or The City, without further particularisation. Its great earth- 

 works must have been erected by large gangs or corvees, whose members 

 sometimes died at their work, for their bodies were thrown here and there 

 into the ramparts during the actual work of construction. In its prime, 

 in the first century B.C., this famous hill-town is now known, as the result 

 of excavation, to have contained great numbers of circular huts, with a 

 multitude of storage-pits cut to a beehive shape in the chalk or built some- 

 times of unmortared masonry. The huts themselves were usually of 

 timber and thatch, but occasionally had walls of chalk and flint rubble. 

 They were approached from streets worn hollow with traffic and metalled 

 and re-metalled with flint pebbles — in one case, with the addition of a well- 

 built kerb of imported limestones. The roads passing through the 

 entrances are deeply grooved with prehistoric cartwheels, the gauge of 

 which, between 4^ feet and 5 feet, approximated to the modern standard. 

 Beneath the turf everywhere indeed are vivid vestiges of a busy, crowded 

 scene, with much coming and going, and evidence too, within the limits 

 of a generally primitive society, of not a little civic control and solicitude. 

 And what may be said of Maiden Castle may be said in commensurate 

 degree of other surviving works of the kind — Hod Hill or Eggardun, for 

 example, both in the same county, the former with prehistoric street- 

 lines still visible amongst its multitude of hut sites. By virtue of the 

 permanence of their defensive architecture, the relative extent of their 

 population and the administrative centralisation which they imply, the 

 larger of these works can only be designated ' towns ' or ' cities ' in a true 

 sense of the term. The Romans normally applied to them the word 

 oppidinn, a word whereby Cicero could refer to Antioch or Li\v to Rome 

 itself. 



