ROMANO-BRITISH WORCESTERSHIRE 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 various continental analogies and from the revival of the Celtic language in the sixth century. But the townspeople and the educated seem 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. In a few places, as in the New Forest, its products survived as local curiosities ; in general it met the fate of every picturesque but semi-civilized art when con- fronted by an organized coherent culture. Almost every feature in Romano-British life was Roman. The commonest good pottery, the so-called Samian or Terra Sigillata, was copied directly from an Fig. i. Late Celtic Italian original and shows no trace of native influ- O'^'^ament illustrating . ° .11 . . ,, . , r 1""^ Returning Spiral. ences ; it was mdeed prmcipally imported from abroad. The mosaic pavements and painted stuccoes which adorned the houses, the hypocausts which warmed them, and the bathrooms which increased their luxury, were equally borrowed from Italy. Nor were these features confined to the mansions of the wealthy. Samian bowls and coarsely coloured plaster and makeshift hypocausts occur even in outlying hamlets. The material civilization of Roman Britain comprised few elements of splendour but it was definitely Roman. Agreeably to this general character of the province we find town life in it, but not much town life. The highest form of town life known to the Romans is naturally rare. The colonice and municipia, the privileged municipalities with constitutions on the Italian model which mark the supreme development of Roman political civilization in the provinces, were not common in Britain. We know only of five. Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester and York were colonice, Verulam probably a munici- pium, and despite their legal rank none of these could count among the greater cities of the Empire. Four of them indeed probably owe their existence, not to any development of Britain, but to the need of provid- ing for time-expired soldiers. On the other hand many smaller towns reached some degree of municipal life, of which we cannot precisely specify the character. Originally (as it seems) Celtic tribal centres, they grew into towns just as the tribal centres of northern Gaul grew into towns, under the influence of Roman civilization. They were often small, but their sizes varied widely — from hardly twenty to more than two hundred acres. Strong walls protected them from external assault ; inside, at least in the larger towns a forum built on a Roman plan provided accommodation for magistrates, traders and idlers. Instances of such towns are Silchester and Winchester in Hampshire ; Canterbury
