Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood.

  • R. G. Collingwood
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    from the rudest and remotest village sites, and its place is taken by ‘ Samian ’ ware—the bright red glazed fabric made in Gaul and used as a higher-class pottery all over the Empire—and by wares of a rougher type identical with those used by the rich and by the army for cooking and so forth. In the kinds of pottery used there is no distinction whatever between rich and poor, Roman and Briton, country and town, or hut and villa. Indeed, this adoption of Roman fashions in pottery spread outside the limits of the Empire ; and in Scottish hill forts beyond the frontier Samian and other Roman wares are frequently found. Even in the planning of native villages, far beyond the limits of the higher Romano-British civilization, Roman influences strangely affected British fashions. As an example of this it is interesting to study the plan of a British village built beside the Roman road which crosses Shap Fells almost on the line of the London and North-Western Railway. Here, high on the moors of Westmorland, far from towns and civilization, was a village rude enough in building and furniture, but in plan quite clearly meant to recall the rectangular design of a little Roman fort, with a gate centrally placed in one side, a single large building in the middle, and other smaller dwellings in the remaining space. No one who compares the plan of the British settlement at Ewe Close with the straggling irregular plans of earlier British villages can fail to see that its builders were trying to be like the Romans, and translating into their own spiraliform Celtic idiom a design borrowed from the forts of the occupying army, in whose ranks their own relatives were doubtless serving. The conclusions of this chapter are easily summarized. The town and country life of Roman Britain shows.no cleavage between Roman and Briton. British civilization was not wiped out to give place to Roman, nor did it subsist side by side with the imported culture. In London alone we come near to finding an imported and purely Roman culture, a culture devoid of distinctively
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