curragh

carriage by water was far less troublesome and expensive than by land,1 and it has been well remarked 2 that the rivers Thames and Severn were of prime importance to the development of early British trade. Down these rivers the British trader floated in his frail coracle or of hides, and even ventured to cross over from the western coasts to Ireland. The people of the southern and Cornish shore had, however, ships of oak of a much more seaworthy character, and evidently, from Cæsar's account,5 were skilful and daring navigators. They traded chiefly with Northern and Western Gaul.

§ 11. Physical Aspect of Pre-Roman Britain.

Having gained some idea of the industry and commerce of early Britain, it is now time to glance briefly at the physical condition of the country which the Romans were about to conquer. We are struck at once by the fact that its appearance was vastly different from the aspect which it wears to-day. The typical English landscape of the present, with its smiling pasturage, neat hedges, and well-tilled fields, simply did not then exist, or, at any rate, was to be seen only in a few favoured spots. Whereas to-day the cultivable and cultivated area includes the greater part of the surface, it was at that time only a small fraction of it. Forests and scrub, fen, moor, and marsh occupied most of the land.

"A cold and watery desert" is Elton's description of it, and though his expression is exaggerated, it is nearer the truth than another writer's fanciful epithet 7 of a "land of sunshine and pearls.' Britain was certainly far more rainy then than now, owing

1 So, too, in Europe the main commercial routes followed in France the Rhine, and in Germany the Rhone and Danube; see my Commerce in Europe, §§ 68, 69. 2 Social England, vol. i. p. 89.

* In this commerce coins were probably not much used, and it is supposed that no British coins were struck before 200 B.C., though some are said to appear to be "centuries older than Cæsar's first expedition." Later on the various chiefs seem to have struck silver and other coins for their own tribes in imitation of Gallic and Roman money. Cf. Evans, Coins of the Ancient Britons, for a subject which we cannot discuss properly here.

4 Elton, p. 232.

6 Origins, p. 218.

B

5 Cæsar, B. G., iii. 9, 13.

7 In Social England, vol. i. p. 89.

The

to the influence of the vast forests which covered the land, and consequently also it was more foggy. "The ground and atmosphere were alike overloaded with moisture. fallen timber obstructed the streams; the rivers were squandered in the reedy morasses, and only the downs and hill-tops rose above the perpetual tracts of wood." 1 It was these downs and hill-tops on which the earliest inhabitants, unable to clear the forests effectually with their feeble axes, necessarily practised the first elements of agriculture,2 and it is here that their traces are most abundant. The gradual clearing away of the woodland in later, and especially in Roman, times drew the agriculturist down into the river valleys. The extent of forest was immense. In the South there were more than a hundred miles of the "Andredsweald" between Hampshire and the Medway, and many miles more in the opposite direction into Dorset and Wiltshire. In the Severn valley was the forest of the Wyre, around the modern Worcester, extending right over Cheshire, and the forest of Arden nearly covered all Warwickshire. Another huge wood lay between London and the Wash; the Midlands from Lincoln to Leicester and from the Peak to the Trent were occupied by miles of forest, of which Sherwood and Charnwood are only fractional and fragmentary remains. Yorkshire and Lancashire were wild wastes of moorland and scrub, and most of the country was regarded as a desert that lay between Derby Peak and the Roman Wall.3

The marshes and swamps were also of considerable extent in many low-lying parts that have since been drained and reclaimed. Notably this was the case with the Romney Marsh on the coast of Kent, which, when Caesar came to Britain, was a morass invaded every day by the tide as far as Robertsbridge in Sussex. The low-lying parts of Essex, Surrey, and

1 Elton, p. 218.

2 Green, Making of England, p. 8; and Gomme, Village Community, pp. 75-95, who deals fully with the "terrace cultivation" on the

hills.

8 The above description is based on Green's vivid picture in the Making of England, pp. 10-12.

Kent below London were then "extensive flats covered with water at every tide,"1 and the Thames estuary invaded a district almost as large as the Wash. The valley of the Stour1 was also covered by the sea for many miles above the present tidal limit, while the Wash extended northwards nearly to Lincoln and westwards to Huntingdon and Cambridge. The lower reaches of the Trent formed another huge marsh, and its basin generally was one of the wildest and least frequented parts of the island.2

In this comparatively wild and uncultivated condition of the country, it is easy to believe that wild animals were exceedingly numerous. In fact, they existed till far into the period of modern history. Wolves and bears were met in the vast forests for centuries after the Roman and Saxon invasions, and only gradually became extinct.3 The wild boar was very common, and so late as Henry II.'s reign was hunted on Hampstead Heath, where also were chased the wild cattle whose descendants are now regarded as curiosities in the famous herd at Chillingham Park. A sign of the infrequency of human habitation in certain districts is seen in the numbers of beavers that built their colonies on the streams, remaining in remote parts till the twelfth century. Indeed, it is evident that the Britain of preRoman days must have been, on the whole, a very wild and savage country, many parts of which had scarcely even been trodden by the foot of man. Yet, as we have seen, there were already in some places, especially in the South-East, many marks of civilisation and progress in industrial arts, and when the Romans came to the island they found many tribes and settlements that were considerably advanced in agricultural and domestic industries, though, on the other 1 Airy, in Athenæum, 1683, on the Claudian Invasion of Britain. 2 Making of England, p. 75.

3 Martial (Epigr., vii. 34), mentions the Scotch bear, and Boyd Dawkins (Cave Hunting, p. 75), thinks the native British bear was not extinct till the tenth century A.D. Frequent mention of wolves is found in medieval documents-e.g., in the account rolls of Whitby Abbey, temp. Ric. II., and they probably were not extinct in England till the end of the fifteenth century. (Newton, Zoology of Ancient Europe, p. 24), and in Scotland much later.

4 Girald. Cambrensis, Itin. Wall, ii. 3.

hand, there were others but little removed from savagery. We shall probably be right in supposing that the divergences of culture were very strongly marked, and that a considerable distinction was to be found between the skilled Gaulish farmer of Kent and the wild pre-Aryan inhabitants of the North and West.

CHAPTER II

ROMAN BRITAIN

§ 12. The Roman Occupation.

THE two expeditions of Julius Cæsar in the years 55 and 54 B.C.—the first of which was certainly a failure and the second very nearly so-were followed by almost a century of repose from foreign invasion. It was not till ninety years after Cæsar's earlier attempts that the Romans, led on this occasion by Aulus Plautius, and aided by German auxiliaries, again invaded Britain (A.D. 44). But this time they came to stay, and although the conquest proved perhaps more difficult than they had anticipated, it was under successive generals accomplished at last. The year

70 A.D. may be taken, for convenience, as the date when the power of the most stubborn of the natives was effectually broken, and though much fighting remained to be done, the conquest was practically complete. For seventy years after the victories of Julius Agricola (A.D. 70-84) there was peace, and had it not been for the incursions of the Picts and Scots by land, and of the Saxon pirates by sea, the peace would have been almost uninterrupted. The Romans remained as the rulers of Britain for three centuries and a half, and then the exigencies of self-defence in other regions of the Empire compelled them to retire. The last legions left the island in 407 A.D.1

It is difficult to estimate the exact effect of their occupation. While some very able writers have found reason to believe that it had lasting effects both on the political, municipal, industrial, and especially on the agricultural development of the country, others have regarded it merely as a military administration, similar (as we are told with a rather wearisome paucity of example) to that of the French Green, Making of England, p. 24. The date 410 A.D. is that of the letter bidding Britain provide for its own defence.

2 As e.g. Coote, in his Romans in Britain.