§ 12. Questionable, however, as this evidence is, it is that on which almost all Romano-British sites are established, and by it Cambridge appears to correspond to the Roman Camboritum. The name is seemingly derived from that of the river, with the Celtic affix rhyd, i.e., ford, the word Cam being also of Celtic origin, and signifying "crooked," in allusion to the markedly tortuous course of the stream. Some antiquaries have located Camboritum at Grantchester, seeing that Nennius calls the town Caer Grant; but local investigation shows that at the latter village there was only a small fort, while at Cambridge we find the remains of a considerable station. It is evident, indeed, that Cambridge must always have been the crossing-place of the river, as there, and there alone for many miles, the higher ground approaches the water at both sides. Elsewhere one bank or the other is always low, and must of old have been marshy.

§ 13. On this higher ground, then, and on the highest part of it, that on the west side of the Cam, the Romans fixed their station, possibly on the site of a pre-existing British town. The site is of some natural strength, the projecting extremity of a low range of hills, so that there was a rapid descent from the north and south ramparts, and a perceptible slope from the west side, while the river defended the eastern approaches. The lofty mound commanding the ford (in Roman times doubtless a bridge), which is now the most prominent feature of the site, and is commonly supposed to be of Roman or British origin, has been shown by Professor Hughes to be almost certainly of later date. But even without it the conquerors were quite sufficiently secure. Indeed, after a very few years no fortifications at all were probably needed. The first outburst of native resistance having been crushed, the peculiar power of assimilating her conquests which marked Imperial Rome, even more than Republican, came into full play, and brought about in Cambridgeshire,

as elsewhere throughout the Empire, that wonderful Pax Romana which forms so absolutely unique a phenomenon in the history of the world. For nearly four centuries the county was as wholly peaceful as it has been for the last two, and, to judge by the remains of the period, fully as populous. All along the valley of the Cam, in particular, such remains have been unearthed in extraordinary abundance, remains indicating the presence not of soldiers, nor of the great landlords who dwelt in villas, so much as of a teeming swarm of small agriculturists, whose ashpits, filled with the rubbish of their humble households, have been found by the fossil-diggers of our century in field after field.

§14. The most characteristic feature of this rubbish is, naturally, broken pottery, of coarse and common type for the most part, with an occasional fragment of more delicate "Samian" ware. This ware was not, so far as we know, manufactured anywhere in Britain; it was imported from abroad, and almost invariably bears the stamp of the maker, e.g., CISTIO. TITI. The common home-made ware is never thus stamped.

15. Of Roman arms, offensive or defensive, Cambridgeshire has supplied few examples, nor yet many distinctively Roman ornaments. One brooch, however, found near Barrington, deserves notice as being an exact replica of that discovered in the bed of the Thames on the building of the present London Bridge, and now in the British Museum. It is of bronze, in the form of a swan, once richly gilded, and with a spring pin (held by archæologists to prove its Romano-British origin). The Roman ashpits have also provided specimens of horseshoes-thin, broad soles of iron, without heels, and fastened by the traditional three nails. Thimbles, too, have been found in them, formed of bronze, closed at the end, and pitted, like ours, for the needle, but made to wear upon the thumb, as the name, indeed, shows to

have been the original practice, "thimble" being equivalent to "thumb bell."

§ 16. But, next to pottery, the commonest objects by far are the Roman coins, which have been, in Cambridgeshire, turned up literally by the thousand. No great hoards have been discovered-at least, of late years; but the individual coins are everywhere. They are rarely of precious metal, and for the most part of common type and in poor preservation; but their number is astonishing, and proves how vast an amount of petty traffic then went on in the district year after year and century after century. It would be hard to name a single Emperor, from Augustus to Honorius, whose currency does not occur amongst them, while the list also includes Republican coins and those of Julius Cæsar at the one end, and the name of Valentinian III. at the other. The most plentiful are those of the especially British emperors, Carausius, Allectus and Constantine; and amongst the most interesting are specimens of the commemorative issue struck on the capture of Jerusalem, A.D. 70, bearing the head of Vespasian on the obverse, and on the reverse "the daughter of Jerusalem" weeping beneath a palmtree, with the inscription IVDAEA. CAPTA.

§ 17. Britain continued in connection with the Roman Empire long enough to be included in that magnificent system of administrative division evolved by the genius of Diocletian, and embodied in the Notitia. Heretofore the Empire had been divided only into provinces, governed, some by Senatorial, some by Imperial officials, each responsible only and directly to the supreme central authority at Rome. Constant collisions and abuses were the natural outcome of so inconvenient an arrangement, till Diocletian introduced a new and abiding element of order by his creation of an official hierarchy rising grade above grade, and his corresponding reapportionment of the Roman dominions. By his scheme the whole of

those dominions were distributed into four "Prefectures," each containing on an average some three "Dioceses," and each of these again from five to fifteen "Provinces." Thus, Britain formed a "Diocese "under a "Vicar" or "Count" of "respectable" rank (the second in point of dignity), himself subject to the "Illustrious Prefect of the Gauls," whose authority extended also over France, the Iberian Peninsula, and even Morocco. The diocese comprised five provinces, Cambridgeshire being in that denominated Flavia Cæsariensis, corresponding to the later kingdoms of Mercia and East Anglia. This province was governed by one of the thirty-two "Presidents" of the Empire, under the "Vicar of Britain"; while its military affairs were directed partly by the Vicar of the Diocese, partly by the "Respectable Duke of the Britains," whose headquarters were at York, partly by the "Count of the Saxon1 Shore," whose duty it was to guard the coast against pirate raids, and whose jurisdiction extended over the whole sea-board from Yarmouth to Shoreham.

§ 18. The troops assigned to these functionaries by the central War Office at Rome were not, however, those recruited in the country. It was the constant policy of the Roman Government to discourage local association and local loyalty in its subjects, and to impress them with the solidarity of the Empire by quartering the levies of each province in divers and distant districts. Thus, amongst the thirty-five several bodies of soldiers enumerated in the Notitia as on service in Britain, one alone, the "Victores Juniores Britanniciani," bears a local designation; whilst amongst the others we find not only men of the same prefecture, Gauls, Spaniards, and Moors, but troops from such far-away regions as Dalmatia, Dacia, Thrace, Lybia, and Syria. Even barbarian prisoners taken in war were utilized for the insular service; the

1 See Chapter III., § 1. The name is first found in Eutropius, ix. 21.

energetic Emperor Probus, in 277 A.D., thus adding to his forces in Britain a horde of Vandals discomfited by him on the Rhine, shortly after their great defeat by Aurelian on the Danube. Zozimus mentions that they successfully repressed some local disturbances in our island, and the name Vandlebury, given (on the authority of Gervase) to the great camp on the Gog Magog Hills above Cambridge, not improbably records this remarkable method of recruiting. So may also the many coins of Probus scattered about the district.

§ 19. In spite of such precaution, however, a certain amount of local solidarity could not but grow up in the British army, heterogeneous as its elements were-more especially as those elements seem rarely to have been changed, inscriptions showing, for example, that the Second, Sixth, and Twentieth Legions were permanently quartered, from year's end to year's end, at Dover, York, and Chester respectively. The army of Britain, accordingly, always acted as a whole throughout the various civil commotions which convulsed the Empire in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, and is described by Zozimus as specially distinguished avladeíą xai Ovμç. Here, in 286 A.D., the pretender Carausius assumed the diadem, and the island remained severed from the rest of the Empire till his murderer and successor, Allectus, was overthrown ten years later by Constantius; the reign of these two usurpers being signalized by the first appearance in history of the British fleet, which, under Carausius, developed into so important a factor in politics as even to include a Mediterranean squadron.1 Coins of Allectus, found in the Cam valley, bearing on the reverse a British warship cleared for action, attest the patriotic interest there taken in Britannia's first ruling of the waves.

§ 20. The name of Constantius brings again to our notice the Diocletian system of government, under which 1 See Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chap. xiii.