A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE The inhabitants of the pile dwellings at Cookham were perhaps some of the poorest of the land, but even they acquired something of the civilization and customs of the conquerors. Although there were no large towns of the Romano-British period in the county (for there is no sufficient evidence to support the claims that have been advanced on behalf of Wallingford and Speen), villas are fairly numerous throughout the county. These villas were the proper- ties of large landowners, sometimes Romans but more often probably Romanized Britons, who lived at the houses and cultivated the lands immediately around them by their slaves and let the rest to the half serf coloni. The houses were of types suitable to this climate and only to be found in Britain and Northern Gaul. The simpler, and generally the smaller, of these was the corridor house, which consisted of a row of rooms with a passage or corridor running along one side of them. The other type was the courtyard house, consisting of three rows of like rooms and passages running along three sides of a square, with an open courtyard in the middle. Both types were seldom, if ever, carried higher than the ground floor. Excavations on the Berkshire sites have not been thorough enough, in most cases, to decide which of these types was more usually adopted. The only foundations in the county which have been sufficiently explored to decide this point are those at Frilford, Letcombe Regis and Hampstead Norris, which are all of the corridor type. Besides these three, it is clear from the remains found at Basildon, Maidenhead, Bucklebury, Hampstead Norris (Well House), Lambourn, Letcombe Regis and Woolstone that Roman villas existed here although their plans have not been ascertained. It would seem from the cemeteries which have been found that there were villas also at Fawley, Pang- bourne and Waltham St. Lawrence, though their sites have not been discovered. Taking the distribution of the population geographically, the settlements range themselves into three groups. First come those along the valleys of the Thames, the Kennet, the Ock and the Lambourn, next the few settlements on the chalk downs running through the middle of the county and lastly those along the Antonine highways and to the north of Calleva, the Roman town at Silchester in Hampshire. The first group, which is by far the most numerous and therefore comprised the most populous districts, owed its origin to the waterway of the Thames and its tributaries, and the fertility of the lands rising from the Thames valley for the growth of corn. There are indications of Roman occupation all along the south side of that valley from the burial sites of Windsor and Pangbourne and the villa remains at Maidenhead and Basildon to the native settlement at Long Wittenham already referred to. It contains also a considerable number of sites, such as Abingdon in the valley of the Thames and Boxford in the Lambourn valley, whose claim to permanent occupation is less well substantiated, besides many noted for miscellaneous finds of coins and pottery. 198
