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But within these limits were towns and villages and country-houses and farms, a large population, and a developed and orderly life. To save frequent references, I may say here that much of the evidence for the following paragraphs is to be found in my articles on Romano-British remains printed in the volumes of this History.
In the Romano-British times a church at the other end of the island, in Canterbury, had a like dedication; and these are the only Romano-British dedications of which we are sure, so far as I know. In these dedications we may find an interesting illustration of what took place in Gaul, especially in the parts near Britain.
During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple was built on the site of the present edifice in 627.
Happily, the colloquial form Cantwara burh, or Kentmen's bury, gained the day, and so every trace of Durovernum is now quite lost in Canterbury. North Shields was once Scythles-ceaster, but here the Chester has simply dropped out. Verulam, or St. Albans, is another curious case. Its Romano-British name was Verulamium, and Bæda calls it Verlama ceaster.
During the restoration a granite monumental stone was unearthed, of Romano-British character; it has been placed in the wall outside the tower, and its inscription reads Conectoci fili Tegerno Mali. Whether legends of the lost Langarrow are true or not, there was evidently a considerable population of this part in early British times.
They formed part, even there, of the ordinary environment of life. They were not, as an eminent writer calls them, 'a delicate exotic varnish. Indeed, I cannot recognize in our Romano-British remains the contrast alleged by this writer 'between an exotic culture of a higher order and a vernacular culture of a primitive kind'. There were in Britain splendid houses and poor ones.
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.
Scattered up and down in it lay hundreds of fragments of Samian and other Roman or Romano-British pottery and a far smaller quantity of ruder pieces, a few bits of Roman glass, some Roman coins of the period A.D. 250-350, various iron nails and hooks, querns, bones, and so forth.
As all these pieces were pretty certainly produced in Roman times, the early intercourse seems an inadequate cause. See also Curle, Newstead, p. 319, and R.A. Smith, Proc. Soc. Ant. Soc. Antiq. The contrast between this Romano-British civilization and the native culture which preceded it can readily be seen if we compare for a moment a Celtic village and a Romano-British village.
It is a great pity that this chapel, probably one of the oldest religious structures in the kingdom, was not preserved. Above the Stone Age burial was a dolmen of the Bronze Age; and above this were layers that told of Romano-British civilisation. But the antiquities of this district really need a book to themselves.
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