ROMANO-BRITISH NORFOLK other hand, the Welsh and northern hills formed purely military districts, with forts and fortresses and roads, but with no towns or ordinary civilian life. It was the Roman practice, at least in the European provinces of the Empire, to mass the troops almost exclusively along the frontiers, and Britain was no exception. The army which garrisoned this military district was perhaps forty thousand men. It ranked as one of the chief among provincial armies, and constituted the most important element in Roman Britain. With the military district, however, we are not now concerned. For our present purpose it suffices to note its existence, in order to explain why the traces of military occupation are rare in Nor- folk. But we may pause to examine the chief features of the non- military districts within which Norfolk is included. These features are not sensational. Britain was a small province, remote from Rome, and by no means wealthy. It did not reach the higher developments of city life, of culture or of commerce, which we meet in more favoured lands — in Gaul or Spain or Africa. Nevertheless, it had a character of its own. In the first place, Britain, like all the provinces of the western Empire, became Romanized. Perhaps it became Romanized later and less perfectly than the rest. But in the end the Britons generally adopted the Roman speech and civilization, and in our island, as in all western Europe, the difference between Roman and provincial practically vanished. When the Roman rule in Britain ended about 410 a.d., the so-called ' departure of the Romans ' did not mean what the end of English rule in India or of French rule in Algeria would mean. It was not an emigration of alien officials, soldiers and traders. It was administrative, not racial. Probably the country folk in the remoter parts of Britain continued to speak Celtic during the Roman period : thus much we may infer from continental analogies and from the revival of Celtic in the sixth century. But the townspeople and the educated classes appear to have used Latin, and on the side of material civilization the Roman element reigns supreme. Before the Roman period there was a Late Celtic art of considerable merit, best known for its metal work and earthenware, and distinguished for its fantastic use of plant and animal forms, its employment of the ' returning spiral ' (fig. i), and its enamelling. This art and the culture which went with it vanished before the Roman, at least in its characteristic forms. In a few places, as in the New Forest and in Northamptonshire, its products survived '^'oRNlMENVrLLu^T^r- as local manufactures ; in general it met the fate of ing the 'Returning every picturesque but semi-civilized art when con- Spiral ' (Eiveden, fronted by an organized coherent culture. Almost every dominant feature in Romano-British life was Roman. The com- monest good pottery, the so-called Samian or Terra Sigillata, was copied directly from an Italian original and shows no trace of Celtic influences ; it was indeed principally imported from Gaul. The mosaic pave- 281
