34

ROADS.-PRODUCE.

[A.D. 300. southern and midland provinces of Britannia Prima and Flavia Cæsariensis, as well as to the rich valleys of the northern Maxima Cæsariensis, we can have little doubt, when we look at the roads with which they were intersected, and the numerous towns, forts, and harbours connected by these roads. This network of highways was not constructed for the sole purpose of marching the Roman legions from Dover to London, or from Bristol to Lincoln,-up

Restoration of the Roman Arch forming Newport Gate, Lincoln.

and down through the five provinces wherever there was a revolt to be put down or a tribute to be enforced.* The roads were the great connecting communications of a large population, who had not been without roads and towns in what was called their uncivilised state. They were not rude cartways between one village and another, but substantial works, with bold cuttings, and solid terraces carried by piles over marshy ground, and raised upon piers where elevation was required. Setting aside those numerous branch railways of modern England which the manufacturing element has created, they carried on the communications of the island, from the shores of the English Channel to those of the Irish Sea and the German Ocean, and connected all the inland country from the Thames to the Tyne, as completely, and more directly, than the railway system of our own day. According to the wants of the Roman colonisers and the Romanised English, they made this island, sixteen hundred years ago, one whole. These great works could not have been constructed or sustained except upon a self-supporting principle, derived from the intercourse of a considerable population. Tacitus, in speaking of those grievances of the native people which were remedied by Agricola, says that they were compelled to take long journeys for the purpose of carrying grain to places extremely distant, instead of supplying the troops in the winter-quarters which were nearest the homes of the cultivators. They

* The lines of Roman roads of which undoubted traces exist at the present time, are clearly shown by red lines in the map of "Britannia Romana," published in "Monumenta Historica Britannica."

A.D. 300.]

MINES.

35

35

were obliged to travel to remote places for the benefit of those who monopolised the corn. Here is distinct evidence, before the close of the first century, that the Roman legions and auxiliaries were supported by the produce of a country in which there were roads; and that they were not only supported by the tribute of grain, but that official rapacity wrung still more out of the capital of the cultivators. Had Agricola found a country without intercourse, he would necessarily have found no corn for tribute. The people, in their isolated

fields, would have produced no more than they could have consumed. We are not told by the historian that the oppressive monopolists left the people to starve while the Roman soldiers were fed; but that the greedy officials seized.

Roman Plough.

upon the corn, and made the people buy it for their own consumption. Agricola augmented the tribute; but he made it less onerous by a just and equal distribution of the public burthens. If the produce was considerable, and the communications numerous, in the time of Agricola, we may well conceive that they had kept pace with the wants of an increasing civilised population in the time of Constantius. We cannot have a better evidence of the fertility of Britain, and the ease with which its produce was transmitted to its ports, than is furnished by one remarkable fact in the middle of the fourth century. The Emperor Julian, it is recorded, had built warehouses in his continental dominions for the reception of corn from Britain. But the amount of supply in one season is manifested by the fact, that six hundred large barks, built from the woods of the Ardennes, made several voyages under his direction to the coasts of Britain, and supplied the starving Rhine provinces, desolated by war, from the stores of the fertile island. The Romans had, without doubt, improved the agriculture of the country, and had bestowed upon the cultivators "the crooked plough," with "an eight-feet beam," of the Georgics of Virgil. The abundance of agricultural produce for export assumes the existence of a large rural population. Nor is the fact less clear that there had been, from very early

**

times, a mining population. The tin mines of Cornwall, and the lead mines of Derby

IMT CAES-DOMINO:XCCSVII hire,

Pig of Lead, with the Roman Stamp.

were systematically worked, and their produce reserved with jealous care for Roman use. The pigs of lead in the British Museum, which bear the stamp of Domitian and Hadrian, show that Tacitus was not talking vaguely when he spoke of the abundance of metals in Britain which was the prize of the conquerors. There is visible proof at this day that the mining and smelting of iron was carried on by the Romans in Britain to a very large extent. Hutton, in his

* Georg. I., 174.

36

THE ARMY.

[A.D. 300.

enormous cinder-heap which Yarranton, who published

History of Birmingham," speaks of an had existed there from the Roman time. a book at the end of the seventeenth century, entitled "Improvement by Sea and Land," describes "great heaps of cinders formerly made of ironstone, they being the offal (or waste) thrown out of the foot-blasts by the Romans; they then having no works to go by water, to drive bellows, but all by the foot-blast." At Worcester, he found the hearth of a Roman furnace.; and he carried away many thousand tons of these cinders, which, having been imperfectly smelted, would still yield iron. Roman coins, in large numbers, have been constantly found buried amongst these scoriæ, upon which great oaks were growing. Mr. Thomas Wright, in 1852, went over the Roman iron district of the Forest of Dean and its neighbourhood; where he found deep pits, out of which ironstone had been dug, where Roman coins are frequently discovered; and he traced the cinders covering the earth in many parts of this district, which furnished the ore, and the wood for smelting. On the banks of the Wye, below Monmouth, the cinders "lay under our feet like pebbles on the sea-shore." *

That the first real civiliser of Britain was the military arm, is evident from every incidental relation of the Roman conquest. It was, for a long time, a very doubtful fight between disciplined legions and fearless multitudes. But the power established with so much difficulty could not be sustained without continual watchfulness. It was not only Agricola that erected fortified stations, and planted garrisons, but we may be quite sure that during several centuries they were multiplied all over the land, either as defences of the coast, or in the centre of Roman colonies, or in connection with municipal communities. The country is covered with the most enduring remains of these bulwarks of the Imperial dominion. The earthworks of the people that the Caesars came to conquer still remain in many places. They interposed formidable barriers to the quiet progress of the Roman troops; and they were defended by large bodies of the whole population capable of bearing arms. But the legions and auxiliaries of the Roman garrisons were composed of an army, properly so called-men trained solely to the business of warfare, and wielding their strength under the most complete subjection to the will of an experienced commander, and with all the resources of civilisation that made war a science. The stations were, therefore, selected with all the skill that economises military power. They were on the coast, on the great navigable rivers, on the chief roads. Their distribution, when the rule of Rome was tranquilly established in Britain, was such as to require no very large force to garrison. Although Aulus Plautius is held to have been at the head of four legions and their auxiliaries, computed at fifty thousand men,-although Severus lost fifty thousand followers in his terrible marches through the wild mountainous regions of the North,-we learn from that curious record of the later Roman levies, the "Notitia Imperii," that the permanent forces in Britain amounted to only about twenty-one thousand men. They were all Romans, or soldiers of tributary continental nations. The Britons, according to the invariable policy of Rome, were not entrusted with any share in the charge of the defences. They formed part of the ranks that were employed to hold other nations in subjection.

Gentleman's Magazine, January, 1852.

A.D. 300.]

FORTIFIED PLACES.

37

Of these fortified places, some of the most important remains are found on the coast of South Britain, which was under the command, at an early period, of a military chief, designated as Comes Tractûs Maritimi, and, at a later period, Comes Littoris Saxonici per Britanniam. The Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain had nine fortresses to guard, from Portsmouth to Brancaster, at the mouth of the Wash. The interesting remains of Richborough, in Kent, and Burgh, in Suffolk, show the importance of those maritime stations.

It is not within the object of this history to describe antiquities, but only to allude to them as undoubted memorials of a past time. The holidayvisitor of the Isle of Thanet, if he be not familiar with his country's annals, may have difficulty in comprehending why that fertile territory, now partially

Part of the Roman Wall of London, excavated behind the Minories.

bounded by the sea, is called an island. The railroad, which branches from Minster to Deal, goes beneath the walls of Richborough. The great sea passage from Boulogne to London, now a tiny stream, called the Wantsum, but in the fourteenth century termed an estuary by Richard of Cirencester, passed by these walls, and bore the Roman vessels to Reculver. The nearest station from Gaul was Dover; but the safest and nearest sea passage to London was by Richborough to the estuary of the Thames. Richborough was a colony, where Romans were settled as possessors of the land, and where the institutions of Rome were adopted without any change in the forms or principles of local government. There were nine of these colonies in Britain-London, Colchester, Richborough, Bath, Caerleon (in Monmouthshire), Chester, Gloucester, Lincoln, and Chesterford (near Cambridge). There were also two Municipal Cities, York and Verulam. The Roman walls of some of these places are more or less remarkable; but they are for the most part hidden by modern buildings, or buried amidst the accumulating rubbish of generations. From time to time, in London, when a sewer has to be formed, or a new foundation to be dug deep, we come upon fragments of

38

FORTIFIED PLACES.

LA.D. 300. wall that are undoubtedly Roman. At Lincoln there are fragments of Roman walls and a Roman gate. At York, the Eboracum of the Romans, where Severus and Constantius died, the Roman work has been readily distinguished from the more modern city wall. The walls of Bath have been swept away, whatever was their age; but that they contained many Roman remains is distinctly attested. The walls of Chichester are very perfect. The walls of Colchester "may be advantageously compared with any other remains of the kind in this island, or even on the continent." * Exeter and Chester have walls erected upon Roman foundations. A fragment of Roman wall still stands to point out the site of the famous Verulam. These were all populous places-colonies or municipia. But the remaining walls of Richborough, a great military colony, stand in their

solitary magnificence, as they have stood for sixteen or seventeen centuries, eleven or twelve feet thick at the base, from twenty to thirty feet in height, and their outer masonry as perfect in many places as when their alternate courses of stone and tile were first laid. The sea has receded from them; the broad channel they protected is a ditch; huge fragments have fallen in the course of generations; the area within them of five acres is a corn field; but they still tell something of the story of a great æra in the life of our nation, whose influence will be permanent when even these mighty ruins shall be swept away.

Burgh Castle (Gariannonum) is situated at the junction of the Waveney and the Yare. The east wall has four circular towers; the west side was once defended by the sea. Both Richborough and Burgh are examples of the

Quarterly Review, No. cxciii.