READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

CAH.VOL.XII

THE IMPERIAL CRISIS AND RECOVERY. A.D. 193-324

CHAPTER VIII. BRITAIN

I.

CITIES, VILLAS, VILLAGES

IN this chapter an attempt is made to sketch the state of Britain, apart from political and military affairs, in the third and fourth centuries. It would be unnatural, in the case of Britain, to follow rigidly the rule of this volume and end with Constantine the Great; enough is therefore said about the later fourth century to indicate the general lines along which events were moving at the close of the Roman occupation; but there is no need here to discuss the social and economic conditions of early fifth-century Britain in detail.

The close of the Antonine age divides the history of Roman Britain into two parts, each with a well-marked character of its own. Thanks to Haverfield’s collection and sifting of evidence concerning villas it has long been known that, so far as these are concerned, the graph of British prosperity was rising throughout the third century to a climax in the fourth; and as lately as the time when Rostovtzeff wrote his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire it could be argued on this ground that Britain formed an unexplained exception to the general rule, according to which the third century was an age of depression and bankruptcy all over the Empire. Since then, the excavations carried out at Verulam, one of the chief towns of Britain and in the heart of its most peaceful district, have altered the perspective in which the evidence of the villas must be placed.

Verulam, when its magnificent walls were laid out under Hadrian, was a large and rapidly-growing town. It continued to grow for some time, but reached its high-water mark about the end of the second century, and a decline set in. By the middle of the century, the process of decay has become evident. By about 275 the walls were to some extent in ruins, the theatre had fallen into disuse and was being quarried for building-materials, and so severe was the general dilapidation that, as the excavator writes, Verulam ‘must at this time have borne some resemblance to a bombarded city.’ The proximate cause of this condition can hardly have been foreign invasion or civil war: it must have been sheer economic exhaustion.

In the light of these new facts, others long familiar gain fresh significance. At Wroxeter the great Hadrianic forum was burnt down about 160 and rebuilt. About the end of the third century it was burnt down again, and lay thereafter in ruins. Here, as at Verulam, the third century saw prosperity give place to exhaustion. Evidence of a similar kind, but undated, has been found elsewhere. At Silchester, some of the best houses fell at some time into slum­conditions, when people lit their cooking-fires on tessellated pavements. At Caerwent, the sites of deserted and ruined houses were used for the erection of an amphitheatre within the walls. It is tempting to conjecture that the decay of Silchester and Caerwent may have happened, like that of Verulam and Wroxeter, in the third century; but even without this conjecture the evidence of a catastrophe affecting town-life during that century is clear. Britain was not exempt from the ‘rapid and disastrous decay’ which elsewhere overtook the cities of the Roman world.

The ultimate causes of this decay are a matter of general Roman history and lie outside the subject of this chapter. But there is evidence from Britain supporting Rostovtzeff’s view that it was connected with a reversal of Imperial policy: that whereas earlier emperors had subsidized and protected urban life, Severus and his successors looked upon towns as convenient reservoirs of wealth, easily tapped to defray the general expenses of the Empire. The evidence consists of certain small inscriptions on Hadrian’s Wall, implying that parts of it were built at their own charges by the tribal authorities of Britain and that these parts belong to the Severan reconstruction rather than to Hadrian’s original work. The tribes named are the Catuvellauni whose capital was Verulam, the Durotriges, and possibly (the stone is lost and the reading corrupt) the Brigantes. The demand for such contributions towards the defence of the country must in any case have borne hardly on the tribal cities, whose prosperity had depended more on official encouragement than on spontaneous growth; and it was even more significant in what it ultimately implied than in what it immediately entailed. For ultimately it implied that the central government was tired of fostering an urban civilization; and, in Britain at least, town-life was not strongly enough rooted to survive the change. The first phase of romanization, when romanization meant urbanization, was over. The history of the third and fourth centuries is the history of a second phase, when Britain was evolving a new form of civilization, Roman or Romano-Celtic in style, but no longer urban in structure.

As thus stated, the position is no doubt over-simplified. The cities did not cease to exist; politically and juridically they still served as centres of local government, and they even retained some economic importance as centres of industry. Here and there, especially in outlying regions, there was actually an increase of urban prosperity, as in the little frontier-town of Corbridge, whose industrial activity mainly dates from after the time of Severus. And the general decay of town-life was not uniformly accepted by the central government as inevitable: on the contrary, we find Constantins Chlorus making heroic efforts to restore Verulam to its earlier grandeur, and similar efforts were made elsewhere; but their effects were not proportionate to the labour and cost expended. The days when the city was economically and culturally the focus of civilization were gone for good.

In the second phase of romanization, the centre of interest lies in the villa. This was an isolated farm-house standing in the middle of its own land, a block of dwelling-house and outbuild­ings, generally more or less rectangular in shape, enclosing a farm-yard, not unlike the farm-steadings that exist today in parts of England where the population is not concentrated in villages. The isolated farm is typical of Celtic agriculture, and there is reason to think that the Romano-British villa-system owed some of its characteristic features to the scattered farms of the pre-Roman countryside. In certain cases, such pre-Roman farms have been transformed into villas by a process of architectural and cultural romanization; evidently their owners, substantial and independent yeomen, were ready to welcome Roman ways of living and rich enough to pay for their fancy without government subsidies. In that sense the rise of villas was a more spontaneous movement than the rise of towns; and because more spontaneous, it proved more lasting. Sometimes no doubt a villa was the bailiffs residence on an Imperial domain; sometimes it was built by a speculator taking up uninhabited land on favourable terms; but these were the exceptions. As a rule, villa-dwellers were British farmers, large or small, who romanized their houses and themselves of their own free will. The largest among them were no doubt also those same tribal grandees who carried out the public business of the tribe in the cities, and these would presumably have town-houses as well as their villas in the country.

The rise of the villa-system, or perhaps we should say the systematic romanization of the British farm, was a thing of slow growth. It began very soon after the Claudian invasion, but throughout the second century it was only gathering momentum; even in the fourth, new villas were being built and old ones en­larged. There is some evidence of a special boom in the early third century, and it is difficult not to connect this with the simultaneous check in the growth of towns. If, as has been sug­gested, the government’s new predatory attitude induced the higher classes to conceal their wealth as far as possible, they would live more on their country estates, and allow their town­houses to fall into disrepair and use them as little as possible; while those whose duties did not call them to the town would retire to the country altogether.

This movement into the country must have been further stimulated by the monetary crisis of the late third century. The violent rise of prices accompanying that event must have made the ordinary operations of household marketing all but impossible. In towns, food and all kinds of necessaries must have become unprocurable; but families living on their own estates could keep themselves in almost all the necessaries of life independently of fluctuations in prices, and this was an additional motive for living in the country. For the villa was to a great extent self-supporting; and what it could not produce for itself (pottery, window-glass, ironmongery, and so forth) it could probably at a pinch obtain by barter, exchanging its own surplus produce. This may partially account for the way in which many villas tended to develop into small industrial establishments, smelting lead, working. iron, fulling cloth, making tiles, and so forth. This industrialization of the villa was never so widespread and seldom so thoroughgoing in Britain as it was in Belgium, but it was far from rare, and must have been valuable when money became an insecure means of exchange.

When the Diocletianic reorganization of the Empire intro­duced a new age of peace and prosperity, within whose radius Britain was drawn by the work of Constantius Chlorus, a fresh attempt was made to stimulate the moribund cities, but the villas could profit by the new conditions without any artificial aid. The stormy times of the third century had taught the Britons how to live quietly and comfortably on the land; now that times were better, the chief difference was that they lived more luxuriously. This seems to have been the age when villas were largest and most sumptuous. In some, there are as many as thirty or forty living­rooms, surrounding an inner courtyard away from the noise and smell of the farm-buildings; these larger villas are placed with a keen appreciation of the value of soils, slopes, and exposure to sun, and planned with a degree of spaciousness and elegance not to be matched again until the eighteenth century; while their decoration is up to the highest standards of Roman Imperial art. This prosperous country-house life was much promoted by the establishment of a sound currency; in many Romano-British villas the Constantinian coins outnumber all the rest put together. It was also promoted by the financial policy of the age, which favoured large estates at the expense of small, and tended to make rich men richer. But it was not created by these conditions. It was the farm-system of the pre-Roman Britons, passed through a triple process of change: first, owing to its adaptability, acquiring a romanized form; secondly, owing to its solidity, surviving the economic crisis of the third century; and thirdly, left now alone in the field, profiting by the new prosperity of the Constantinian age.

The history of the villa-system after the middle of the fourth century is obscure. In a great many villas, the coins found cease between 350 and 370. It has been argued that this points to a widespread destruction of them—in fact, the virtual extinction of the villa-system—in the invasions of which the most severe was perhaps the barbarian incursions of c. 367. But certain recent excavations suggest that, had the majority of our villas been more expertly dug, evidence of a much longer occupation might have been found; while the autobiography of St Patrick strikingly shows how such invaders, in a long-continued series of raids, may avoid killing the goose that lays them the golden eggs. Alter­native hypotheses are therefore, in the present state of our knowledge, worth considering.

Even if the invasions of the late fourth and early fifth centuries did not destroy the villas, they certainly made the roads unsafe and so did much to ruin the system of trade which (as we shall see later) had grown up on the decay of the town markets. The effect of this would be to intensify the self-supporting character of the villa, and teach it to do without many things which hitherto carters and pedlars had brought to its doors. In consequence it would stand less and less in need of money, and would tend to revert towards an altogether moneyless economy.

The same consequence would be produced by something for which we have abundant evidence in Gaul and which can hardly have been absent from Britain, namely brigandage by revolted peasants and broken men. These Bagaudae (as they were called in Gaul) were an inevitable product of fourth-century economic conditions. Every recruit to their bands meant another man withdrawn from productive labour and living henceforth by robbery; and where they were numerous the wealth of the villas, and in particular their trading capacity, must have suffered proportionally. The cessation of coins in villas can thus be accounted for without assuming either violent destruction or even disastrous impoverishment. All that need be assumed is that, owing to foreign invasion and civil disorder, the villas were being reduced to the economic status of self-supporting households.

After the decay of the towns, the villas, even including their entire staff of labourers and their families, can hardly have contained five per cent, of the population, and of the rest the great majority must have been agricultural peasants. Originally these may have been to a great extent members of legally and economically independent village-communities; but the changes of the Imperial age, especially in its later phases, must have reduced them to a servile status, dependent on wealthy landowners, speculative capitalists, or the managers of Imperial domains. They lived in villages, amorphous clusters of one-roomed huts, fenced against wild animals; their main occupation was mixed farming, the cultivation of crops (mostly wheat) in little rectangular or irregular fields and the pasturing of livestock in the open country beyond. Here and there, especially in the well-known Cranborne Chase villages dug by Pitt-Rivers, they were a good deal influenced by Roman ways of living; but for the most part their romanization was hardly above the vanishing-point, and they lived, so far as material civilization was concerned, much as their prehistoric ancestors had lived before them. In certain districts, especially the Fens, there was a great rise of peasant population during the Roman period, due in this case to large-scale drainage which can hardly have originated in anything but capitalistic enterprise. Elsewhere, notably in Wiltshire, whole villages died out in the fourth or even the late third century, perhaps through the deliberate transplantation of their inhabitants. This again may possibly be connected with the growth of the woollen industry, to which we shall return. Arable land cannot be turned into sheep-walks without depopulation.

We have seen that the third and fourth centuries were an age of individualistic farming, which tended to the creation of larger and larger estates. We shall see that the same tendency is visible in the sphere of industry. Under these conditions, the wealthier individuals reached a high degree of comfort and prosperity. But the smaller men, and especially the old village-communities, paid the price for these developments by being reduced to the status of a proletariate. Not only was their condition unimproved by the general prosperity, it was depressed by it. The contrast between rich and poor was not only a contrast in wealth and comfort, it became increasingly a contrast between security and insecurity. It was not enough to be poor; the poor were exploited and oppressed in a thousand ways, which the Gaulish writers of the late Imperial age have described in burning phrases. They took their revenge by revolt and brigandage, and thus joined hands with the barbarians in overthrowing the civilization that had oppressed them.

The chief conclusion which has emerged from this survey is that the replacement of the town by the villa as the main vehicle of romanization really means the replacement of State initiative by individual initiative in the promotion of civilized and romanized life. The towns represent romanization as the central government wished to have it; the villas represent it in the shape in which it commended itself to the individual British landowner. If we turn to industry, we shall see a similar change going on.

II.

INDUSTRIES AND TRADE

To begin with mining and metallurgy. The gold-mine of Dolaucothy, the only one of which we know, belongs to the early part of the Roman period; there is no indication that it continued to be worked during the later centuries. Perhaps the payable deposits were by then exhausted. The same cannot be true of the argentiferous lead-ores in the Mendips and elsewhere; for these have had a great history since Roman times; but it is a curious feet that all the lead pigs, which are the chief testimony to the Roman working of these ores, belong to the first and second centuries. Did lead-mining cease after that time?

The mining-settlement at Charterhouse-on-Mendip has yielded relics of the first and second centuries; in the third, they become rare. Similarly, the lead-working village at Pentre in Flintshire seems hardly to have lived beyond the second century. On the other hand, the Roman objects found in connection with lead-mines in the Matlock district become commonest in the fourth century, though there are no pigs of that time. The inference seems to be that after the Antonine period lead-mining went on, and in some districts with increased intensity, but that in some way the organization of it was modified. During the early period, to judge from the pigs, it was a State monopoly; but the Derbyshire pigs show that in some cases the industry was leased to conductors, and it is at least possible that the total lack of pigs dating from the third and fourth centuries indicates a still further development by which the mines came into the hands of comparatively small lessees, no longer important enough to issue pigs stamped with their own names, but carrying on the industry, effectively enough, by independent work at scattered sites all over the lead-fields. It has been suggested that the numerous and large hoards of late fourth-century silver coin found in and about the Mendips are a testimony (despite the absence of confirmation from Charterhouse) to continued prosperity among the lead-miners of that region down to the last phase of the Roman occupation, the coin flowing into the mining-district in cash payment for lead produced there; and this would suit well with the hypothesis that centralized State exploitation had been super­seded by a system in which small miners or groups of miners worked for their own hand.

Iron-mining, too, went on. The slag-heaps of the Weald show evidence of working throughout the Roman period: in some there are signs of renewed and intensified activity, perhaps after a gap, in the third and especially the fourth centuries. In the Forest of Dean mining went on until early in the fourth century: the one excavated iron-mine, however, on the hill of Nodens at Lydney, was not worked after the third, and seems to have been occupied by a very primitive community dealing little in coin and doing its trade by barter. On the whole, the evidence suggests that iron-working continued to flourish in one district or another throughout these later centuries, but was in the hands of in­dependent miners and metallurgists working for the most part on a small scale and in somewhat primitive conditions.

The case of tin is peculiar. Early in the Roman period, a few short-lived and isolated attempts were made by Roman settlers to exploit the Cornish ores, but this had come to an end before the middle of the second century. About 250, however, the Spanish tin-mines closed down, and supplies had to be sought elsewhere. A boom in Cornwall was the almost immediate result. Roads were built by the emperors of the late third and early fourth centuries; Roman coin flowed into Cornwall in large quantities; and dinner-services of tin and pewter began to be fashionable in British villas. How was this revived industry organized? An ingot of tin from Carnanton was thought by Haverfield to bear the stamped letters dd nn, which would indicate State property; but metallurgical experts who have re-examined it lately are unable to see the letters, nor are they visible to the present writer in Haverfield’s photograph; and unless the reading can be verified we should be wise to assume that here, too, the ores were worked by independent miners, operating by themselves or in small groups, whose sale of their produce (as in the case of the Mendip hoards) would account for the influx of Roman coin.

Another industry of which something is known during this period is pottery. In the first and second centuries the pottery of ordinary domestic use in Britain falls almost without residue into two classes: the high-class ‘Samian’ ware imported from Gaul, and the coarse pottery of local manufacture. As long as the Gaulish factories supplied the luxury demand, little was expected of the local potters except cheap and serviceable goods; but the collapse of the ‘Samian’ industry in the third century gave an opening to any British potter who could put on the market something rather more ornamental and refined. For the most part, the local potters failed to take their opportunity; to do so implied special conditions in the shape of good clay and high technical skill; but here and there such conditions were present, and industries grew up capable of supplying the demand for dinner­table wares. The two best-known examples are those of the Nene valley and the New Forest. In the Nene valley, the industry goes back to the late second century, but its great period is the third and fourth, and during the greater part of that period its prosperity was steadily increasing. Excavations at Castor and elsewhere give us a picture of a society of master-potters, men of some wealth, living in genteel houses with good tessellated pavements and the furniture of ordinary well-to-do provincial life, close beside the kilns which were doubtless worked by hired or servile labour under the immediate supervision of its employers. The favourite metallic lustre-ware of the Nene valley works travelled all over the country and did much to replace the vanished ‘Samian.’

In the New Forest an equal degree of technical success was accompanied by an altogether different type of organization. Small independent potters lived a semi-nomadic life in the woods, building themselves temporary kilns and sleeping in huts like those of charcoal-burners; each working for his own hand though in a common tradition, and each peddling his own goods or entrusting them to a middleman hawker. The hard, durable, well-fired pots from these New Forest kilns, often effectively decorated with lustrous glaze or painted patterns or stamped designs, circulated widely over the southern districts, though unlike the Nene valley wares they hardly touched the north.

Here, as in the case of mining, we seem to trace in the third and fourth centuries a widespread and flourishing industry based entirely on individual enterprise; sometimes developing features akin to those of a factory-system, but mostly remaining at the level of artisan production. In mining, this individualistic system appears to have superseded the earlier system of State exploitation; in pottery, it developed a new degree of technical skill, concentrated production, and wide distribution, through the breakdown of the Gaulish factories. In order that such a system should be possible, communications must have been good and transport cheap all over the country; for the essence of the system is that certain districts specialized in the kind of products to which they were best adapted, and sold them in a market scattered very widely over the countryside. One result was that the less progressive local potters in face of this competition were either restricted to the production of very cheap and inferior goods or else put out of business altogether. By the fourth century, a large and increasing proportion of the pottery in ordinary use appears to have been thus made by specialists and distributed over wide areas.

One striking example is provided by the blackish, hand-made, calcite-gritted ware which was used in enormous quantities at military sites in the north during the last quarter of the fourth century. It is in many ways primitive, almost prehistoric, in technique, though quite good enough for rough domestic service. The quantities of it that have been found imply a colossal output, and its uniformity suggests a single place of origin: and in recent years one place of origin has been identified at Knapton in Yorkshire. It looks as if, owing to special conditions of market and distribution, a local industry preserving certain very ancient methods of manufacture had suddenly acquired almost a mono­poly of providing coarse pots to the northern garrison-troops.

The textile industry was developing at the same time along lines to some extent similar. We know of three villas in the south of England which, at some date subsequent to their original building, and therefore probably not earlier than the third century, have been wholly or partly converted into fulling-establishments. The scale of these establishments is far too large for satisfying the needs of a single estate, or even of a single small district. The cloth treated in them must have come from large areas and must have been widely distributed after treatment; in fact we have here archaeological confirmation of the entry about ‘British woollen cloaks’ in Diocletian’s Edict of Prices, implying that the products of the British woollen industry were a staple article of trade in the Empire at large. So far, the industry was presumably run by private persons; but the Notitia Dignitatum mentions a praepositus gynaecii Ventends in Britain, that is, the manager of a State cloth­mill presumably at Winchester; which indicates that side by side with the privately-owned industry there was also a State-owned industry, no doubt making up the wool grown on Imperial domain-lands.

The history of trade during these centuries is not unlike that of industry. The early importation of luxury-articles and of things necessary to a romanized life has dwindled to a mere fraction of its former self. Glassware and a certain amount of pottery are coming in from the Rhineland; and a good deal of wine and oil are perhaps still being imported, although home-grown tallow, beer and even (after Probus) wine are much used as substitutes. By the third century, and still more by the fourth, imports would seem to have become quite inconsiderable. Exports consisted, we must assume, mainly of raw materials like iron, lead, leather; also, increasingly, of woollens, and apparently of dogs and perhaps still slaves and cattle on the hoof. The use of British artisans by Constantius Chlorus in Gaul does not indicate an economic demand there for British technical skill, it was doubtless an ordinary administrative corvée, and Julian’s shipment of British wheat to devastated areas on the Rhine comes similarly under the heading not of trade but of forced levies in kind. In short, apart from a steady trickle of goods across the northern frontier into Caledonia, we have as little reason to think that Britain now exported much as to think that she imported much. She was, in all essentials, self-providing.

Internal trade, however, was very active indeed. The distribution of Castor or New Forest pottery would by itself be sufficient proof. Coal, no doubt from the Somerset mines, freely reached the native villages of Wiltshire. The centralization of such processes as fulling proves either that weavers sent their own cloth long distances to be fulled or (more likely) that the fullers bought it up and resold it after treatment. All this implies a good and well-maintained system of communications. Milestones show that in the third and fourth centuries much care was bestowed on road-maintenance; and the Fenland waterways carried a heavy barge-traffic handling pottery from the Nene valley.

But here too there is evidence that the system operating in the third and fourth centuries differed from that of earlier times. At first, the chief instrument of internal trade was the town with its market-place and shops. No doubt, this urban retail trade required supplements of another kind. We can hardly suppose that every ‘ Samian ’ cup in a Wiltshire village was brought there by a villager who had ridden or driven to the nearest town to get it. There must have been itinerant salesmen even when the towns were at the height of their prosperity. But when the towns decayed, from the early third century onwards, the increasing volume of internal trade must have flowed almost entirely through channels which left the town on one side. One of these was doubtless the itinerant hawker, whether a whole-time middle-man or an artisan peddling his own goods: another was the country market or fair, of which an example has been identified with much probability at Woodeaton close to Oxford. Thus the failure of the official Roman urbanizing policy, although that policy was conceived partly in the interests of commerce, did not injure Britain commercially; a spontaneous growth of independent traders, small and large, arose all over the country, developing with the development of individualistic manufacture, and satisfied all the requirements of internal trade so long as the roads were well kept and safe for peaceful travellers.

III.

ART AND RELIGION

Art in Britain, during the later Roman period, presents a very curious problem. After the first generation or two from the conquest, the hope of a flourishing Romano-British style, comparable with those of regions no farther away than the Moselle valley, died away and vanished for ever. In sculpture, apart from a few official monuments probably made by foreign workmen, there is practically nothing after that date except the most barbarous and incompetent prentice-work. In metal-work, where the Britons had once been so successful, the remnants of Celtic taste which still lend interest to the products of the second century disappear almost entirely, swamped by the mass-production of goods imitating Continental models. In pottery, the Castor factories have been hailed as repositories of a surviving or reviving Celtic spirit: but their designs are in no sense properly British; they are merely an offshoot of the Romano-Celtic Rhineland style. There is more real spontaneity and charm, less that is merely imitative and sophisticated, in the New Forest designs, but even here it would be an exaggeration to speak of a school of Romano-British art. In a word, the spirit of early British art seems to have been altogether crushed by the uniform culture of the Western Empire. The works of art which the standards of that culture demanded, such as tessellated pavements and painted walls, nowhere show any trace of the ancient Celtic tradition.

None the less, the end of the Roman occupation saw that tradition re-asserting itself and building up a new school of design which was to have a glorious future in the early Christian art of the British Isles. This Celtic revival was not due to the invasion of Britain proper by Picts and Scots free from the contamination of Roman taste; it originated inside the romanized area, and first manifested itself in the celticizing of decorative motives drawn from Roman art. The fact is clear, however we may try to explain it, that the tradition of pre-Roman art was still alive, although submerged. And, paradoxical though it may seem, there is reason to suspect that the vitality of this tradition accounts for the badness of the art which the Britons produced under Roman rule. Celtic art had always been abstract, an art of pure linear pattern; Roman Imperial art was naturalistic, based on representation of human and other natural forms. The Britons, unable to combine these opposite tendencies, never so far forgot their own tradition as to adopt the other with success; when the reason for trying to adopt it was removed, they went back to their own traditional style and were henceforth free to go wherever it led them.

In any attempt to study the religious life of a Roman province, it is necessary to distinguish between the official cults, to which everyone was expected to conform, and the spontaneous practices of the people. Intermediate between these two were cults neither official nor popular, but sectarian: propagating themselves by proselytizing, and demanding of their votaries no mere conformity but a sincere and lively faith.

The official cults, to judge from inscriptions, were kept up throughout our period by military and other officials with singularly little effect on the general habits of the people: little, indeed, even on those of the army itself. In Gaul, a certain absorption of the Roman pantheon by the natives is attested by modern place-names. The lack of any such evidence in Britain may no doubt be due to the replacement of Celtic place-names by Germanic; but in Gaul the evidence of place-names is supported by that of epigraphy, and evidence of this kind, though not wholly absent, is in Britain rare. There are very few cases in Britain where we have reason to think temples existed to Juppiter or Mars or Minerva or Apollo, other than those serving official purposes.

The real religion of the British people was a system of local cults by which the divinities dwelling in certain places were worshipped at these places themselves. Originally such a place was not a built temple, it was (to quote an inscription from Bath) a locus religiosus, and offerings made there were not of such a kind as to preserve for posterity the name of the god inhabiting it. But, as time went on, a few of these cults acquired in externals a certain degree of romanization. During the third and fourth centuries there arose at many sacred places in the south and south­east of Britain temples of the kind known as Romano-Celtic: a small square building surrounded with a portico and having annexed to it a house for the priest or hermit who tended it. In the north they do not occur; but we find a parallel phenomenon, small rudely-made altars after the Roman fashion, dedicated to this or that local Celtic god: the distribution of the altars enables us to guess the neighbourhood in which the god’s home lay, and we can thus locate a dozen or more cults. Sometimes the worshippers who dedicated these altars went a step further, and identified the god with some member of the Roman pantheon. But this can hardly be called romanization in religion; it was a give-and-take process by which local Celtic worships increased their celebrity and their following among soldiers and officials, accepting in return certain outward features of Roman religious practice. Side by side with these local cults there was a system of rites and festivals based upon the calendar; but for these our evidence is mostly indirect, gleaned partly from the later institutions of the unromanized Celtic fringe, and partly from their survivals in English folklore. Of a Celtic pantheon or group of gods worshipped semper, ubique, ab omnibus, Britain yields no trace. What uniformity these cults possessed was due, not to the existence of dominating figures like the Juppiter Optimus Maximus of Rome, but to family likeness among the cults and festivals themselves.

The sectarian religions of Mithras, Sarapis, Isis, Cybele and the rest can be traced as passing fashions affecting the military and cosmopolitan elements in the population. Mithraism, the most important of them, became popular among the frontier garrisons in the third century. To suppose that it ever influenced the civil population, or became part of the general religious tradition of the country, is quite unwarranted by what we know of it.

From the historian’s point of view the appearance of these sectarian cults is interesting chiefly as a praeparatio evangelica. Like them, and in competition with them, Christianity began as an Eastern sectarian cult. Statements of Tertullian and Origen imply that it was making headway in Britain in the first half of the third century, and there is no reason to doubt them. At the beginning of the fourth, we have the names of three Britons (Alban of Verulam and Aaron and Julius of Caerleon) who suffered in the Diocletianic persecution, and of three British bishops who attended the Council of Arles in 314. By the time Christianity ceased to be a sect and became the official cult of the Empire, there was thus an organized system of Christian communities in Britain, having in many towns little churches like that which has been excavated at Silchester. It was still the religion of a minority, and a poor minority at that. Even late in the fourth century, the forces of wealth and social rank were still on the side of paganism, and were producing such things as the splendid temple of Nodens on the hill-top of Lydney. The ultimate triumph of Christianity owed nothing to the secular arm; it was achieved after Britain had parted from the Empire, and was the work of churchmen and missionaries, recapturing for Christ what Caesar had already lost.