A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE nobles and upper classes of the native population, with but a slight infusion of Italian immigrants. The common assertion that they were Roman officers or officials may be set aside as rarely, if ever, correct. The wealth of these landowners must have been almost solely agricultural ; their lands were probably for the most part sheep runs and corn land and supplied the cloth and wheat which are mentioned by ancient writers as exported from Britain during the later Imperial period. The peasantry who worked on these estates or were otherwise occupied in the country lived in rude hamlets formed of huts or pit dwellings with few circum- stances of luxury or even comfort. But even their material civilization was Roman. Here, as among the upper classes, the Late Celtic art yielded to the strength of Italian influences. In both town and villa a remarkable feature is presented by the houses. While thoroughly Roman in their fittings, they were in SI BUT Fic. 2. Plans of Colrtyard and Corridor Houses at Silchester (scale I : 720). (The left-hand block shows a courtyard house with a corridor house adjacent ; the right-hand figure a small corridor house by itself.) respect of ground plan and therefore of general arrangement by no means Roman. They do not in the least resemble the houses of ancient Rome and Pompeii or the country houses which have been dug up in Italy. They belong instead to types which occur only in Britain and northern Gaul and by no means improbably represent Celtic fashions, altered by Roman contact but substantially native. A common type is that known as the Corridor type (fig. 2), which shows a straight row or range of rooms with a corridor running alongside of them and generally with some slight enlargement at one end or the other. Another more elabo- rate type shows three such rows set round a large unroofed rectangular courtyard. Very similar to this last is a type in which the buildings round the courtyard are not continuous, but stand isolated each in the middle of one of the three sides ; in such cases the blocks may consist of corridor houses, of barns, outhouses and farm buildings of various plans (fig. 3). There appears to be no great difference between town and country in the distribution of these types, but the stateliest country villas seem to 162
