SKETCHES

FROM

ENGLISH HISTORY.

I.

THE ROMAN OCCUPATION.-GREEN.

[At the time of Cæsar's invasion of Britain, B.C. 55, the land was inhabited by the Celts, who were members of the great Aryan family of nations to which the Romans themselves belonged. The natives were in a semibarbarous condition, and, though they fought bravely for their homes, were no match for the trained legions of the Empire. Cæsar himself made no systematic attempt to subjugate the island; but about a hundred years after him the work of conquest was begun in earnest and pushed steadily until all the country south of the Forth had submitted to the Roman arms. Britain remained a province of the Empire for three hundred and fifty years.]

THE island of Britain was the latest of Rome's conquests in the west. Though it had been twice attacked by Julius Cæsar, his withdrawal and the inaction of the earlier emperors promised it a continued freedom; but a hundred years after Cæsar's landing, Claudius undertook its conquest, and so swiftly was the work carried out by his generals, and those of his successors, that before thirty years were over, the buik of the country had passed beneath the Roman sway. The island was thus fortunate in the moment of its conquest. It was spared the pillage and exactions which ruined the provinces of Rome under the Republic, while it felt little of the evils which still clung to their administration under the earlier Empire. The age in which its organization was actively carried out was the age of the Antonines, when the provinces

became objects of special care on the part of the central government, and when the efforts of its administration were aided by peace without and a profound tranquillity within. The absence of all record of the change indicates the quietness and ease with which Britain was transformed into a Roman province. A census and a land-survey must have formed here, as elsewhere, indispensable preliminaries for the exactions of the poll-tax and the land-tax, which were the main burdens of Rome's fiscal system. Within the province the population would, in accordance with her invariable policy, be disarmed; while a force of three legions was stationed, partly in the north to guard against the unconquered Britons, and partly in the west to watch over the tribes which still remained half-subdued. Though the towns were left in some measure to their own self-government, the bulk of the island seems to have been ruled by military and financial administrators, whose powers were practically unlimited. But, rough as their rule may have been, it secured peace and good order; and peace and good order were all that was needed to insure material development. This development soon made itself felt. Commerce sprang up in the ports of Britain. Its harvests became so abundant that it was able at need to supply the necessities of Gaul. Tin mines were worked in Cornwall, lead mines in Somerset and Northumberland, and iron mines in the Forest of Dean. The villas and homesteads which, as the spade of our archæologists prove, lay scattered over the whole face of the country, show the general prosperity of the island.

The extension of its road system, and the upgrowth of its towns, tell above all how rapidly Britain was incorporated into the general body of the empire. It is easy, however, to exaggerate the civilization of Britain. Even within the province south of the firths the evidence of inscriptions shows that large tracts of country lay practically outside the Roman life. Though no district was richer or more peopled than the

south-west, our Devonshire and our Cornwall seem to have remained almost wholly Celtic. Wales was never really Romanized; its tribes were held in check by the legionaries at Chester and Caerleon, but as late as the beginning of the third century they called for repression from the Emperor Severus as much as the Picts. The valleys of the Thames and of the Severn were fairly inhabited, but there are fewer proofs of Roman settlement in the valley of the Trent; and, though the southern part of Yorkshire was rich and populous, Northern Britain, as a whole, was little touched by the new civilization. And even in the south this civilization can have had but little depth or vitality. Large and important as were some of its towns, hardly any inscriptions have been found to tell of the presence of a vigorous municipal life. Unlike its neighbor, Gaul, Britain contributed nothing to the intellectual riches of the empire; and not one of the poets or rhetoricians of the time is of British origin. Even moral movements found little foothold in the island. When Christianity became the religion of the empire, under the house of Constantine, Britain must have become nominally Christian; and the presence of British bishops at ecclesiastical councils is enough to prove that its Christianity was organized in the ordinary form. But as yet no Christian inscription or ornament has been found in any remains of earlier date than the close of the Roman rule; and the undoubted existence of churches at such places as Canterbury, or London, or St. Albans, only gives greater weight to the fact that no trace of such buildings has been found in the sites of other cities which have been laid open by archæological research.

Far, indeed, as was Britain from the center of the empire, had the Roman energy wielded its full force in the island it would have Romanized Britain as completely as it Romanized the bulk of Gaul. But there was little in the province to urge Rome to such an effort. It was not only the most distant of her western provinces, but it had little natural