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Perhaps copying Roman originals seen in northern Italy, Frederic Stupor Mundi now built on a chess-board pattern the Terra Nova which he founded in Sicily. Now, in 1231, Barcelonette was built with twenty square 'insulae' in south-eastern France. Now, too, the 'Bastides' and 'Villes Neuves' of southern France and towns like Aigues-Mortes were built on similar plans.
Others were four or five times as spacious; they were twice or nearly twice as large as mediaeval Oxford, no mean city in thirteenth-century England. Most of them, doubtless, grew beyond their first limits; a few spread as far as a square mile, twice the extent of mediaeval London. Similarly the 'insulae' varied from town to town. In one, Timgad, they were only 70 to 80 ft. square.
Those who had little means or none lived as parasites of more fortunate relatives; though beggars, they housed in palaces palaces, it is true, which had often no more comfort within their marble walls than the insulae where the ignoble laid their heads. When all had perused the will, Basil rose up and addressed them.
If not, O Lord, remove me hence!" The "Athenaeum", Oct. 26, 1853. The account of St. Patrick's Purgatory given by Luis Enius in this long narrative is taken immediately from the seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters of Montalvan's "Vida y Purgatorio de San Patricio", which, as already stated, are themselves a translation from the "Florilegium Insulae Sanctorum" of Messingham.
The plan of Florence in 1427 shows a group of twenty unmistakable 'insulae', each of them about 1-1/8 acre in area, that is, very similar in size to the 'insulae' of Turin. This group is bounded by the modern streets Tornabuoni on the west, Porta Rossa on the south, Calzaioli on the east, Teatina on the north; it covers a rectangle of some 305 x 327 yds., not quite 21 acres.
A rectangular area about 700 yds. from east to west and 360 yds. from north to south is divided into fifteen square or squarish 'insulae' arranged in three rows. Whether there were other 'insulae' besides the fifteen is doubtful.
Outside this area, the division of the town into 'insulae' is less completely carried through, although most of the streets run straight on as far as the walls, and one or two details may tempt us to think that the division into 'insulae' was at some time extended beyond the line ultimately taken by the walls.
But the regularity of the plan is plainly the work of civilized man. When the Celts were brought to live in a Roman city, care was taken that it should be really Roman. Only we may perhaps wonder whether the plan may not have been drawn by Augustus with an eye more to the future than to the present and may have included more 'insulae' than there were actually inhabitants to occupy at once.
At Cirencester, the Romano-British centre for the canton of the Dobuni and a still larger town than Wroxeter, the 'insulae' near the Basilica seem to have measured as much as 120 yards in length, though full details have not yet been obtained. Both these towns may be ascribed to the later years of the first century and to the same civilizing process as Silchester and Caerwent.
The ordinary callousness of human nature had, under the baleful influence of slavery, become absolute blindness, nor were men's eyes to be opened until Christianity began to leaven the world with the doctrine of universal love. We saw that the poorer classes in Rome were lodged in huge insulae, and enjoyed nothing that can be called home life.
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