13-3. The Roman civic order in Britain
We can to some extent trace this movement. Quite early in the period A.D. 43-80, the British town Verulamium, just outside St Albans in Hertfordshire, was judged to have become sufficiently Romanised to merit the municipal status and title of municipium (practically equivalent to that of the colonia manned by veteran soldiers). The great revolt of Boudicca (less correctly called Boadicea) in A.D. 60 was directed not only against the supremacy of Rome but also against the spread of Roman civilisation, and one incident in it was the massacre of many thousands of loyal natives along with actual Romans. Romanisation, it is plain, had been spreading apace. Nor did this massacre check it for long.
The Flavian period ( A .D. 70-96) saw in Britain, as indeed in other provinces, a serious development of Roman culture and in particular of Roman town life, the peculiar gift of Rome to her western provinces. In the decade A.D. 70-80, the Britons began, as Tacitus tells us, to speak Latin and to use Latin dress and the material fabric of Latin civilised life. Now towns sprang up, such as Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) and Caerwent (Venta Silurum), laid out on the model approved by Roman town-planners, furnished with public buildings ( forum, basilica, etc. ) of Roman style, and filled with houses which were Roman in their internal fittings, with baths, hypocausts, and wall-paintings, if not in ground plan. Now the baths of Bath (Aquae Sulis) were equipped with civilised buildings suited to their new visitors: the earliest datable monument there belongs to about 77. Two coloniae also were planted. Hitherto there had only been one, established by Claudius at Colchester (Camulodunum): now one was added at Lincoln (Lindum) and in 96 a third at Gloucester (Glevum).
A new Civil Judge (legatus iuridicus) begins to make his appearance beside the regular legatus Augusti pro praetore who was at once commander of the troops and judge of the chief court and governor of the province, and the appointment is doubtless due to increasing civil business in the law courts. When Tacitus praises Agricola because he encouraged the provincials to adopt Roman culture, he praises him for following the tendency of his age, not for striking out any novel line of his own. It is probable that by the end of the first century, Roman civilisation was laying firm hold on all the British lowlands. Subsequent progress was slower, or at least less showy. Little advance was made beyond the lowlands. Towns and villas were rare west of the Severn, and save in the vale of York they were equally rare north of the Trent.
The uplands remained comparatively unaffected. Their population, as recent excavations in Cumberland and in Anglesey have shewn, used Roman objects and came to some extent within range of Roman culture. But it seems impossible to speak of them as fully civilised, even if, in the later years of the Roman occupation, they did not remain wholly barbarian. In the lowlands we may ascribe to the second and third centuries the development of the rural system and the building of farmhouses and country residences constructed in Roman fashion. It is very difficult to date these houses. But the evidence of coins seems to shew that the end of the third and the first half of the fourth century were the periods when they were most numerous and most fully occupied, and when, as we may fairly argue, the countryside of Roman Britain was most fully permeated with Roman culture. For such a conclusion we shall have the support of a neighbouring parallel in Gaul.
The administration of the civilised part of Britain, while of course subject to the governor of the whole province, was in effect entrusted to the local authorities. Each Roman municipium and colonia ruled itself, including a territory which might be as long and broad as a small English county. Some districts probably belonged to the Imperial Domains and were ruled by local agents of the Emperor; such, probably, were the lead-mining districts, as on Mendip or in Derbyshire or Flintshire. The remainder of the country, by far its largest part, was divided up, as before the Roman conquest, among the native cantons or tribes, now organised in more or less Roman fashion: each tribe had its council (ordo) and tribal magistrates and its capital where the tribal council met. Thus, the tribe or canton of the Silures, the civitas Silurum as it learnt to call itself, had its capital at Venta Silurum, Caerwent (between Chepstow and Newport); there its council met and decreto ordinis, by decree of the council, measures were taken for the government of the tribal area which probably covered much of Monmouthshire and s ome of Glamorgan. This, we know by epigraphic evidence, occurred at Caerwent and we shall not be rash in assuming, on slighter evidence, that the same system obtained in other tribal areas in Britain. It is just the system which Rome applied also to the local government of Gaul north of the Cevennes: it illustrates well the Roman method of entrusting local government to a restricted form of Home Rule.
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