Particularly in regard to its influence on the County of Wilts. 203 



habits of the people were left unbroken, and were only emphasised 

 anew by the West Saxon invaders. Our virtues and our defects are 

 matters of long and steady growth, and he who would work in 

 Wiltshire must take this into account. Conservative for good and 

 evil, friendly but somewhat undemonstrative — such I suppose were 

 the Belgse, such are the Wiltshiremen. 



Since writing this paper I have been much interested to hear of 

 the excavations in the Wansdyke in Calstone parish and on the Tan 

 Hill side of Shepherds Shore recently made by General Pitt-Rivers, 

 with his usual conscientious care and careful registration of results. 

 The discovery of Samian ware and oyster shells under the banks of the 

 dyke seems to show that the work is Roman or post- Roman rather 

 than pre- Roman and Belgic. It had occurred to me in writing my 

 p aper, though I had not time to put the conjecture into plausible 

 shape, that the Wansdyke was a Roman work, probably executed 

 by Ostorius Scapula, to protect the first province of Britain, which, 

 as we have seen, apparently contained the country of the Belgse, the 

 Atrebates, and the Regni. If General Pitt-Rivers's discovery be 

 substantiated, though our antiquaries may lose a pre- Roman monu- 

 ment, they may gain one which will enable us to rival in interest 

 the classic ground of Northumberland and Cumberland. It is 

 natural to suppose that the compendious sentence of Tacitus already 

 quoted, " Cuncta castris cis Antonam et Sabrinam fluvios cohibere 

 parat " (he makes preparations to keep in check the whole country 

 on this side — i.e., on the east 1 — of the rivers Anton and Severn by 

 the construction of camps) refers not only to a chain of military 

 stations, but to the vallum of the Wansdyke, parallel as it is in 

 great part of its course to the road from Calleva to the Bristol 

 Channel, which, as we have seen, possesses in our county old 



1 The Romans not improbably thought that the axis of our inland ran more 

 S.W. to N.E. than it actnally does, and therefore cis might almost be paraphrased 

 "to the south of," It is remarkable that the " provincia inferior " seems to have 

 included the eastern part of the island, and the "superior" the western, the 

 modern Wales. York, for instance, was apparently in the "lower province" as 

 well as London, 



