BEGINNINGS OF TOWN-LIFE IN BRITAIN 517 



province was agricultural, and Romano-British agriculture remained 

 essentially pre-Roman in its equipment and environment. Therein lies 

 the crux of the problem. 



Much play has been made of the sending of British grain-ships to 

 the Rhine at a moment of emergency in the fourth century, but there is 

 no evidence that Romano-British agriculture produced any great surplus 

 for export. Coulters from the developed wheel-plough have been found 

 at Silchester and (long ago) on the site of a villa in Gloucestershire, but 

 we have no reason to infer that the heavy, fertile clay lands were brought 

 appreciably into cultivation during the Roman period. We shall never 

 know the extent or detailed nature of the lands tilled in the vicinity of the 

 great Romano-British country houses, such as Chedworth or Witcombe 

 or Bignor ^ ; but we are at least certain that the general map-pattern of 

 Romano-British country life remained primarily prehistoric, and shows 

 no real similarity to that of the evolved countryside of the middle ages. 

 It may reasonably be suspected that the Roman villa system disciplined 

 some part of Romano-British agriculture, rather than revolutionised it. 



In the past insufficient weight has usually been attached to this large 

 static element in the composition of Roman Britain. The modernity of 

 the town- and road-map of the province is misleading to the casual glance. 

 The Roman engineer cut his roads through miles of forest and built his 

 causeways fearlessly across swamps, in modern fashion. The towns 

 occupy modern valley sites at river crossings. But there the modernity 

 of the map ends. For the rest, the fertile forest lands remained uncleared, 

 the swamps undrained. Both alike continued to be almost as devoid of 

 inhabitants as before the legions came. This point is a vital one. The 

 background of Roman Britain was derived directly from Early Iron Age 

 Britain : a background showing the downs of Sussex and of Wessex 

 still thickly populated with peasant farmers whose agricultural equipment 

 and general environment were almost identical with that of their pre- 

 Roman forbears. 



Roman Britain failed, then, not merely because of the increasing cor- 

 ruption and mutability of imperial authority, nor yet merely because of 

 barbarian onslaught. It failed equally because it was designed by its 

 masters as a closely co-ordinated commercial province, whereas at heart 

 it remained essentially what it had been in the pre-Roman era — a province 

 of nucleated but poorly equipped agricultural folk, capable of providing 

 hardly more than sufficed their own needs, with little margin for barter. 

 It lacked the wherewithal to balance a sustained import trade, to subsidise 

 a permanent middle class. The new urban populations, after living 

 awhile in a fool's paradise, drifted steadily into pauperism, and their cities 

 decayed into slums. The long-ruined forum of Wroxeter, the theatre 

 of Verulamium used as a rubbish dump in a half-derelict city, are eloquent 

 of the desperate pass to which Roman urbanity had come by the latter half 

 of the fourth century. The Roman valley cities had failed in the purpose 



1 The heavier soils in the neighbourhood of these country houses have been so 

 extensively tilled in the middle ages and later that actual traces of Roman 

 tillage are unlikely now to be detected there. On the other hand, the intensive 

 exploration of a limited area — say, 10 miles square — in a region rich in Roman 

 country houses might be expected to provide useful hints on this point. 



