514 NORMAN LOCKYER LECTURE 



In the light of these new or newly verified facts, it is difficult now to 

 deprive the Celtic inhabitants of lowland Britain of the rights of citizen- 

 ship. Whether by modern standards these cities were or were not ' slums ' 

 is unimportant. It cannot be denied that the British lowlanders of the 

 first century B.C. were organised extensively in civic units : citizenship 

 was no innovation in Roman Britain. But let not this modification of 

 the traditional view be pressed too far. One important element of the 

 fully developed civic life of the classical world was absent or merely 

 incipient in the life of these downland cities : namely, commerce. The 

 almost endless cultural variety which marks British Iron Age settlements 

 of the kind reflects their essential parochialism. Their economic basis 

 was agricultural. Their economic outlook was defined almost entirely 

 by the productivity of a given tract of countryside in relation to a limited 

 agricultural equipment. If I may again cite Maiden Castle, I would 

 emphasise how few of the many hundreds of objects found there during 

 four years' intensive exploration are likely to have been brought from far 

 afield. Stone, iron, clay, bone, horn were all to be found within four miles 

 of the site. Bronze or its components would have, it is true, to be im- 

 ported into the region, but bronze was sparingly used. Two coral 

 beads merely emphasise the extreme rarity of ' luxury ' imports. Nor 

 is the explanation far to seek. The tracts of naturally open country in 

 which the Iron Age population was nucleated produced, as a rule, little 

 that was of export value. There was little or nothing wherewith to 

 balance an import trade. The downland citizens lived mainly by ' taking 

 in each other's washing.' Movements of population from overseas, 

 dynastic ambition and other disturbing accidents broke their routine 

 from time to time, but neither caravans nor argosies linked them 

 permanently with worlds beyond the horizon. 



This conclusion may seem at first sight to be at variance with the 

 statement of Strabo, at the beginning of the present era, that Britain 

 exported corn, cattle, gold, silver, iron, skins, slaves and hunting-dogs 

 — a statement modified indeed by the same writer when he refers also 

 to the meanness and small worth of the British exports. This export 

 trade was doubtless confined mainly to the Belgic states of the south-east, 

 whose cities, as indicated above, are in fact related to traffic-lines to a 

 degree not apparent in the downland oppida of the west. Its importance 

 is that it linked south-eastern Britain, however vaguely, with Roman Gaul 

 or even Italy, and so prepared the way for that Roman occupation which, 

 as we would now claim, may more fairly be said to have remodelled than 

 to have created the urban life of the British lowland. 



The modernity of the general lay-out of Roman Britain is familiar. 

 Backed by an imperial treasury and a central authority, the Roman 

 engineers arterialised the new province with a simplicity and directness 

 that have retained their influence even into an industrial era which could 

 not be foreseen. When not merely ancient cities such as London, 

 Leicester, Winchester and York, but even essentially modern growths 

 such as Manchester and Wigan are found to be in direct contact with 

 Roman Britain, it is easy to stress the almost uncanny vision of the Roman 

 surveyor. And in detail the astonishingly modern features of a Romano- 

 British town are sufficiently familiar : the well-drained streets, the number 



