by Second Edition, Greatly Enlarged With Twenty-One Illustrations Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1912 [Illustration: HEAD OF GORGON, FROM THE PEDIMENT OF THE TEMPLE OF SUL MINERVA AT BATH (1/7). (SEE PAGE 42.)] Henry Frowde Publisher to the University of Oxford London, Edinburgh, New York Toronto And Melbourne...

The following paper was originally read to the British Academy in 1905, and published in the second Volume of its Proceedings (pp. 185-217) and in a separate form (London, Frowde). The latter has been sometime out of print, and, as there was apparently some demand for a reprint, the Delegates of the Press have consented to issue a revised and enlarged edition. I have added considerably to both text and illustrations and corrected where it seemed necessary, and I have endeavoured so to word the m

Head of Gorgon from Bath. (From a photograph) Frontispiece 1. The Civil and Military Districts of Britain 2, 3, and 4. Inscribed tiles from Silchester. (From photographs)  5. Inscribed tile from Silchester. (From a drawing by Sir E. M.     Thompson)  6. Inscribed tile from Plaxtol, Kent, and reconstruction of lettering.     (From photographs) 7. Ground-plans of Romano-British Temples. (From Archaeologia ) 8. Ground-plan of Corridor House, Frilford. (From plan by Sir A. J. Evans) 9. Ground-plan o

Historians seldom praise the Roman Empire. They regard it as a period of death and despotism, from which political freedom and creative genius and the energies of the speculative intellect were all alike excluded. There is, unquestionably, much truth in this judgement. The world of the Empire was indeed, as Mommsen has called it, an old world. Behind it lay the dreams and experiments, the self-convicted follies and disillusioned wisdom of many centuries. Before it lay no untravelled region such

One western province seems to form an exception to the general rule. In Britain, as it is described by the majority of English writers, we have a province in which Roman and native were as distinct as modern Englishman and Indian, and 'the departure of the Romans' in the fifth century left the Britons almost as Celtic as their coming had found them. The adoption of this view may be set down, I think, to various reasons which have, in themselves, little to do with the subject. The older archaeolo

We may now proceed to survey the actual remains. They may seem scanty, but they deserve examination. First, in respect of language. Even before the Claudian conquest of A.D. 43, British princes had begun to inscribe their coins with Latin words. These legends are not merely blind and unintelligent copies, like the imitations of Roman legends on the early English sceattas . The word most often used, REX, is strange to the Roman coinage, and must have been employed with a real sense of its meaning

From language we pass to material civilization. Here is a far wider field of evidence, provided by buildings, private or public, their equipment and furniture, and the arts and small artistic or decorative objects. On the whole this evidence is clear and consistent. The material civilization of the province, the external fabric of its life, was Roman, in Britain as elsewhere in the west. Native elements succumbed almost wholesale to the conquering foreign influence. In regard to public buildings

Art shows a rather different picture. Here we reach definite survivals of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before the Claudian conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal and enamel, and characterized by its love for spiral devices and its fantastic use of animal forms. This art—La Tène or Late Celtic or whatever it be styled—was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly clear in Britain. When the Romans s

I have dealt with the language and the material civilization of the province of Britain. I pass to a third and harder question, the administrative and legal framework of local Romano-British life. Here we have to discuss the extent to which the Roman town-system of the colonia and municipium , and the Roman land-system of the villa penetrated Britain. And, first, as to the towns. Britain, we know, contained five municipalities of the privileged Italian type. The colonia of Camulodunum (Colcheste

From this consideration of the evidence available to illustrate the Romanization of Britain, I pass to the inquiry how far history helps us to trace out the chronology of the process. A few facts and probabilities emerge as guides. Intercourse between south-eastern Britain and the Roman world had already begun before the Roman conquest in A.D. 43. Latin words, as I have said above (p. 24), had begun to appear on the native British coinage, and Arretine pottery had found its way to such places as

So far we have considered the province of Britain as it was while it still remained in real fact a province. Let us now turn to the sequel and ask how it fits in with its antecedents. The Romanization, we find, held its own for a while. The sense of belonging to the Empire had not quite died out even in sixth-century Britain. Roman names continued to be used, not exclusively but freely enough, by Britons. Roman 'culture words' seem to occur in the later British language, and some at least of the