The roads of the province (p. 192) are numerous, though fewer than our English antiquaries sometimes suppose. Those in the south, as Mommsen rightly saw, radiate from London: see p. 192 above. The northern military district is traversed by three main routes. One runs up the west coast to the Solway and Carlisle. A second runs through the east of the island, from York to Corbridge and to various points on the eastern part of Hadrian’s Wall. The third, diverging from the second, crossed the Yorkshire and Westmorland hills and thus reached Carlisle. From Corbridge and Carlisle roads ran on northwards, and the eastern, if not the western, of these gave access to the Wall of Pius. The Roman roads of Wales are still imperfectly known, but there was a road from Chester to Carnarvon, another from Caerleon past Neath to Carmarthen, and a third joined the western parts of these two, while others connected the forts in the interior.

More doubt surrounds the Romanisation of the province. Vinogradoff (Growth of the Manor, p. 83) thinks that the Roman civilisation spread like a river with many channels which traverse a wide area, but only affect the immediate neighbourhood of their banks. I agree rather with Mommsen’s conclusion (pp. 193, 194)—though the real difference between the two writers is not so very great. The towns, both municipalities and “country towns,” seem to have been thoroughly Romanised. The numerous farms and country-houses (often styled "villas") are also in nearly every respect Roman, and the very scanty evidence which we possess as to the language used in them favours the idea that it was Latin. Even the villages, such as Pitt-Rivers excavated (Excavations in Cranborne Chase, etc., 1887–98), show little survival of native culture. It is to be noted, too, that Celtic inscriptions of Roman date, such as occur occasionally in Gaul (Rhys, Proc. British Acad. ii. 275 foll.), are wholly wanting in Britain. Probably, therefore, Roman civilisation came to predominate throughout the lowlands, though not in its more elaborate and splendid forms. There were, however, thinly populated areas where we can trace hardly any population of any sort, Romanised or other, as, for example, the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and a large part of the Midlands (Vict. Hist. of Warwickshire, i. 228), while the Cornish, Welsh, and northern hills seem never to have admitted very much Romanisation outside the forts which garrisoned parts of them. The analogies of other western provinces, of Gaul (above, vol. i. p. 101) and Africa (ii. 328), suggest that Celtic speech may have lingered on in such districts for centuries, though not as an element hostile to the Roman; it is also quite probable that Celtic private law and custom survived beside the Roman (L. Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht, p. 8). But we have no distinct evidence of either fact.

The spellings Ordovici (p. 182 and map) and Cartimandus (pp. 182, 183) are Mommsen’s own choice.

SYRIEN und MESOPOTAMIEN.

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