Meanwhile events were rapidly ripening towards the catastrophe which was to make the solemn Notitia Imperii a mere hunting-ground for the archæologist. In 395 died the great Emperor Theodosius, who had for a generation staved off the ruin which seemed inevitable at the death of Valens. He was succeeded by his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, who, with about equal incapacity, presided over the collapse of the eastern and the western half of the empire. For the first thirteen years, however, of the reign of Honorius his incapacity was somewhat veiled by the courage and ability of the Vandal soldier Stilicho, whom Theodosius had left as the guardian of his son. When in the year 400 Alaric, the far-famed King of the Goths, entered Italy, Stilicho undertook the long and wearisome campaigns, partly, as it would seem, north of the Alps, but chiefly in what we now call Piedmont and Lombardy, by which Alaric’s designs on Rome were foiled, and at last in the year 403 the Goths were driven forth from Italy. But in order to avert the danger which thus threatened the heart of the empire, it was necessary seriously to weaken the defence of its extremities. One of the three Roman legions quartered in Britain (probably the Twentieth) was recalled to Italy and apparently never returned. Three years after the repulse of Alaric came in 406 the great cataclysm of the irruption of barbarian hordes, Vandals, Sueves, Burgundians and Alans into Gaul, which led, though not immediately, to the severance of Gaul and Spain from the empire. The inrush of the barbarians spread terror even into Britain, and caused the soldiers, weary of the inept government which was manifestly ruining the empire, to elect an emperor on their own account, and set up, as it were, a “government of national defence”. But revolutionary rulers of this kind are more easily proclaimed than established. First a certain Marcus was proclaimed: then as they found that “he did not suit their tempers” he was slain, and a British citizen named Gratian was invested with the purple, crowned with the diadem and surrounded with a bodyguard. After four months Gratian also was deposed and murdered, and thereupon a private soldier of the meanest rank, named Constantine, who had nothing but that great historic name to recommend him, was robed in the imperial purple. He at once crossed over into Gaul, where he maintained himself with varying fortune for three or four years, being even once, in 409, for a short time recognised as a legitimate partner in the empire by Honorius. With his later fortunes, however, and with the whole story of the fall of the Roman empire in the west we have no further concern. We have heard of the exit of the legions, but we never hear of their return, and we are probably justified in fixing on the date 407, the period of the usurper Constantine’s departure from our island, as the end of the Roman occupation of Britain.
Writers and readers must alike lament the extremely jejune character of the history of that occupation. Since we lost the guidance of Tacitus, we have had scarcely anything that could be called a continuous and intelligible narrative of events; nor, unless some happy fortune could restore to us the lost books of Ammianus, is such literary assistance now to be expected. We are thus thrown back on such information as inscriptions, buried ruins, finds of coins may afford to the patient archæologist. And these have done something for us, though we may reasonably hope that the judicious use of the spade and pickaxe, guided by science and not by mere capricious quest for curiosities, may do much more.
We may here notice very briefly some of the chief contributions which archæological research has thus made to history.
1. Of all the marks made by our imperial conquerors in this island, the most distinct and ineffaceable was that made by them as road-makers. Often indeed their works survive only as boundaries between parishes or counties, but sometimes we can see the track still going straight to its mark over hill and dale, and we say instinctively, “That must be a Roman road”. It was certainly not mere unskilfulness or ignorance of the science of road-making which led the stratores viarum to draw their lines across the country with this uncompromising directness. The prime object of the officer charged with the work was essentially military, and for watching the movements of barbarian insurgents or preventing the ravages of marauders, the crests of the hills successively surmounted by the marching legions were invaluable posts of observation.
The chief highways of the Romans, known to us for the most part by the names given to them by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, converging, as most of them do, towards “the town anciently named Londinium,” coincide in a remarkable manner with the main lines of our modern railroad communication. The Watling Street, running from the neighbourhood of London to Etocetum (a little north of Birmingham) and thence to Deva (Chester) and so on into Lancashire, corresponds with the London and North-Western Railway; while another road which generally bears the same name and which traverses Yorkshire and Northumberland is less accurately represented by the North-Eastern. Erming Street, from London to Doncaster, is often not far from the line of the Great Northern; and Abona (on the Avon near Bristol) and Isca Damnoniorum (Exeter) were reached by roads bearing now no special names, but imitating in their general course the Great Western and South-Western Railways. One great artery, the Fosse Way, may be clearly traced between Axminster (in Devonshire) and the great colony which now bears the name of Lincoln; but this road has no representative in our railway system. The imperfect character of the Roman conquest of the district which we now call Wales is evidenced by the feeble and fragmentary traces of Roman roads now to be found in the principality. There was, however, a road traversing the country from north to south, from Carnarvon to Carmarthen, and thence by a somewhat circuitous course to Caerleon-upon-Usk, and part of this road is still known by the name of Sarn Helen. Is it possible that there is in this name some vague and inaccurate remembrance of the mother of Constantine?
2. The sepulchral inscriptions which have been discovered in large numbers in various parts of the island give us a little insight into the domestic relations of the Roman garrison, as the votive altars do into their sentiments concerning religion. The former class of inscriptions always begin in the usual Roman style with a dedication to the Dii Manes, the shade-gods, or, as we should say, the spirit of the departed one, and often add some endearing epithet to the name, such as “a well-deserving husband,” “a most religious wife who lived for thirty-three years an unspotted life”. Where the age is mentioned it is most frequently that either of a child or a person in middle life, the numbers between thirty and forty being of frequent occurrence. This is probably accounted for by the fact that veterans, whether officers or privates, would generally return to their native land to spend the last years of their lives. The religious inscriptions bring before us some interesting phenomena, but are so far characterised by one memorable omission, that of the new religion which was destined to supplant the old. The ordinary Olympian deities, Jupiter, Mars, Bellona, Neptune, are of course commemorated, though in a somewhat perfunctory fashion; and the official divinity of the emperors, living and dead, is duly recognised. But we have also a number of altars to gods bearing uncouth Celtic names: Belatucader, Anociticus, Cocidius and the like, plainly showing that the Roman soldiers, like the Assyrian settlers in Palestine,[22] wished to keep on good terms with the gods of the land. Even more conspicuous is the devotion of the Roman soldiers to “the unconquered Mithras”. The strange Oriental cult called Mithraism, probably a form of sun-worship, spread rapidly through the Roman empire in the second and third centuries, and seemed likely at one time to be a successful rival to Christianity. It is marvellous to see in the palace of the Roman emperors at Ostia a chapel with all the emblems of Mithraic worship, and then to find the remains of a similar chapel with precisely similar emblems, though broken and mutilated, on the bare hillside of Housesteads in Northumberland. The favourite symbol of this strange dead religion is a young man, crowned with a tiara, bestriding a bull, into whose side he is driving deep a short sword or dagger. Whatever this curious bas-relief may represent—and some have seen in it a symbol of the sun, the unconquered hero entering the constellation Taurus—it was no doubt faithfully reproduced in that little chapel on our northern moorlands, and it is perfectly figured on a small marble tablet lately discovered under the pavement of a London street while the workmen were repairing a sewer.
Thus, of so many strange pagan superstitions we have abundant vestiges, but of Christianity in Roman Britain we have singularly few traces. It is true that here and there among undoubtedly Roman remains the Christian monogram (X P) or Christian formulæ such as Vivas in Deo or Spes in Deo have been met with.[23] In the recent excavations at Silchester a small building which is almost certainly a Christian basilica has also been discovered, but these are slight evidences for the existence of a faith which was certainly professed by multitudes ere the legions quitted Britain. As to the actual date of the introduction of Christianity into our island we must be contented to confess our ignorance. The story contained in the book of Papal Lives, which was reproduced by Bede, that a certain King Lucius of Britain, about the year 180, sent over to Pope Eleutherus, asking for missionaries to instruct his people in the Christian faith, must be dismissed as the fable of a later age; nor can we speak with much certainty concerning the so-called proto-martyr, St. Alban, who is said to have suffered for the faith in the persecution of Diocletian. There can be no doubt, however, that there were some converts to Christianity in Britain during the second century, and in the third century it must have become the dominant religion here as in the rest of the empire. Towards the end of that century our island, which produced so many rival Cæsars, produced also one of the most famous of heretics, Pelagius, and, of course, the existence of his heterodoxy implies also the existence of the orthodoxy out of which it sprang. Thus, though we cannot help sometimes relying on the “argument from silence,” the present condition of our archæological information concerning the existence of Christianity in Roman Britain shows us how untrustworthy may sometimes be that very argument.
3. It is, however, partly in reliance on such negative evidence that we venture to assert that the Roman occupation of Britain was before all things a military occupation, and that they either did not attempt, or did not succeed in the attempt, largely to win over the inhabitants to their own ways and to accustom them to that civic life which had been the cradle of their own civilisation. In Italy itself, in Gaul and in most of the provinces of western Europe we find abundant evidence of the municipalisation of the conquered tribes. “Decurio” and “Duumvir,” which we may represent by town councillor and mayor, are indications of rank which we meet with continually on provincial tombstones in those countries; but in Britain amid the crowd of inscriptions to centurions, tribunes and other military officers who served here we meet with only one here and there to civic dignitaries. “The highest form of town life known to the Romans was naturally rare in Britain. The coloniæ and municipia, the privileged municipalities, with institutions on the Italian model, which mark the supreme development of Roman political civilisation in the provinces, were not common in Britain. We know only of five: Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester, and York were coloniæ, Verulam probably a municipium, and despite their legal rank none of these could count among the greater cities of the empire. Four of them, indeed, probably owed their existence not to any development of Britain but to the need of providing for time-expired soldiers discharged from the army.”[24] There was, of course, a certain number of towns such as Londinium which had sprung out of pre-Roman settlements, some of which no doubt grew and prospered exceedingly with the growth of commerce due to the prevalence of “the Roman peace,” but these towns were apparently not modelled on the Roman pattern, and what may have been the nature of their institutions can only be a matter of conjecture.
It seems probable that the prevailing type of social organisation during the Roman period was the villa or great estate owned by a Roman proprietor and dotted over with the cottages of British serfs or slaves, whose labour was directed for his lord’s benefit by a villicus or farm bailiff, sometimes himself a slave. Whether or no this system lasted on to any great extent after the Saxon invasion (the barbarian invader seating himself in the place of power and claiming all his ousted predecessor’s rights), and whether it thus passed in the course of centuries into the feudal manor, is one of the most interesting questions now debated by our archæologists. Mr. Seebohm is the most conspicuous advocate of this Roman-villa theory, which cuts right across the theories of Kemble and Freeman, who held that the Teutonic invaders brought with them to our island and everywhere established a system of free but co-operative land-ownership, resembling that described in the Germania of Tacitus. The discussion, as has been said, is one of great interest to all who desire to get below the surface in the history of the past ages of Britain, but many positions will probably be won and lost before the battle is finally decided.
The same may be said of the larger question, how far the influence exerted by our Roman conquerors during the four centuries of their stay lasted on after the departure of the legions. That Britain was not assimilated as Gaul was, is admitted by all, the mere fact that Welsh is not, like French, an offshoot from Latin, being in itself a sufficient proof of the difference between the two conquests; but why the Romanisation of Britain was so much less thorough; how far it did after all extend; and what influences modified or destroyed it; these are all questions still unsolved, to which, however, we may, perhaps, some day get an answer from a more thorough and scientific study of Celtic literature, and of Romano-British antiquities.