5i8 .NORMAN LOCKYER LECTURE 



for which they and their highways had been primarily designed and they 

 had no Hne of retreat; for their designers had divorced them, ahke in 

 place and in kind, from the simple rusticity of the pre-Roman hill towns 

 which had in their day constituted a genuine expression of the economic 

 condition of the country. Recovery was impossible, and the subsequent 

 revival of the Roman cities in the changed environment of the middle 

 ages was a tribute to the skill of the Roman engineer, rather than to the 

 achievement of the Roman economist. 



If the Romano-British towns failed, it has long been recognised that, 

 within the strict limits already defined, Romano-British country life suc- 

 ceeded. When the towns, or many of them, were already in extremis, 

 country houses (as at Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire), farms and 

 villages (as at Woodyates, Dorset), were flourishing and rebuilding. 

 Country shrines (Lydney in Gloucestershire, and in the Dorset Maiden 

 Castle) were being built anew, sometimes on a lavish scale. The official 

 religion, Christianity, in spite of the Christian complexion of the literary 

 tradition, appears to have gained only a modest foothold in Roman 

 Britain : its natural vehicle would have been the urban populations, but 

 these, as we have seen, were largely ' down and out.' A single tiny chapel 

 served the needs of Christian Silchester ; another, even smaller, would 

 appear to have served Caerwent. A short list would include the tangible 

 relics of Christianity from the whole of Roman Britain. There were 

 bishops in certain of the larger cities, but their flocks must, for the most 

 part, have been the city rabble. In the remoter countryside of the 

 fourth century, paganism, unreached by urban officialdom, achieved a last 

 eflflorescence before, in the tumult of the Dark Ages, Christianised 

 denizens of the slums were cast forth into the wilds, where their urban 

 faith and their fevered memories of urban splendour combined to 

 Christianise the outlands and to fill them with romance. 



ALEXANDER PEDLER LECTURE. 



The seventh Alexander Pedler Lecture was given in Leicester, in co- 

 operation with the authorities of the University College in tliat city, by 

 Prof. Allan Ferguson, D.Sc, on Monday, May 3, 1937. The lecture 

 dealt with some problems of surface tension illustrated by motion pictures 

 of splashes and the text has been printed in another form in the Proceedings 

 of the Royal Institution {Proc. Roy. Inst., 28, p. 195, Feb., 1934). 



