BEGINNINGS OF TOWN-LIFE IN BRITAIN 515 



and elaboration of the bath-suites, the systems of central heating, the 

 dust-proof floors, the glazed windows, the simple but stately provision 

 for secular and sacred ceremonial, and a hundred other features which 

 combine in some sense to bring Roman Britain nearer than medieval 

 England to twentieth-century civic standards. The ' Romanisation of 

 Roman Britain ' has been emphasised and, in due proportion, rightly 

 emphasised ever since Haverfield began his studies. In the present 

 context attention is directed, however, to the other side of the picture — 

 to the background which this brilliant show of modernity may easily and 

 unduly overshadow. 



For the elaborate urban organisation of Roman Britain substantially 

 failed on test. It provided a pattern of civic life from which the medieval 

 Englishman was later to fashion a new Britain for himself from his own 

 homespun. But the progress of Romano-British researches in recent 

 years, at VVroxeter, Verulamium and elsewhere, has shown us more 

 clearly than we could see before both how Roman Britain failed in this 

 essential feature, and why. In the south, at any rate, the story unfolds 

 itself in this fashion. The Roman armies of invasion in A.D. 43 

 swarmed across lowland Britain, much as their successors swarmed 

 recently across Abyssinia. Native towns which resisted were stormed 

 and dismantled : at Maiden Castle, for example, the dead, slain by 

 Roman swords and arrows, lay hastily buried outside the eastern gate, 

 and the gateway itself had been violently wrecked at the same period. 

 Such incidents would be easy to visualise, even in the absence of evidence. 

 But recent exploration has added significantly to the story. At Maiden 

 Castle, and doubtless elsewhere, the native population was not at once 

 displaced from its hill city. Over the wreck of the dismantled gateway 

 a new road was built into the town, and remained in use for some twenty 

 years. Nor indeed was any other course immediately feasible. To have 

 evicted the native townsfolk from their homes would have been to create 

 a huge and dangerous vagabond-population which would hopelessly have 

 impoverished the country and have brought endless embarrassment upon 

 the invader. Disarmed and left in their demilitarised towns, the natives 

 were sufficiently shepherded by an occasional police-post such as that 

 which can still be seen within a corner of the pre-Roman hill town on 

 Hod Hill in Dorset. Meanwhile on the one hand the conquest could 

 proceed according to plan, and on the other hand the complex task of 

 ' building up ' the new province behind the military zone could be under- 

 taken with the requisite deliberation. 



This work of construction took time ; Roman Britain was not built in 

 a day. Foreign capital had to be attracted into it, by optimistic stories of 

 its wealth in ' gold, silver and other metals ' which Tacitus names as the 

 * reward of victory.' Foreign craftsmen had to revolutionise the homely 

 architecture of the native ; foreign business methods had to be naturalised. 

 All this took time. It was not indeed until the golden era of Hadrian 

 and the Antonines that the Roman towns of Britain were made really 

 shipshape, and then only, it may be inferred, by large grants-in-aid 

 from the imperial treasury. By the middle of the second century cities 

 such as London, with its three miles of massive wall and rampart, or 

 Verulamium with its two miles of wall and its monumental gateways. 



