A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Single men, local occurrences are the least important items in its annals and the fortunes of separate provinces are merged more or less completely in the great movement of the whole mass. We can sketch the features of each or any province, its populousness, its degree of civilization, its mineral or agricultural or commercial wealth. We can string together in a rough narrative a few events connected with it. But we cannot write a real history of it, for it had no individual existence for the historian to trace. A second fact imposes a more serious limitation. When the Romans ruled our island it was not divided into its present counties or into any districts geographically identical with them. Neither the boundaries of the Celtic tribes nor those of the Roman administrative areas, so far as we know, agree with our existing county boundaries. The student of Roman remains discovered in any one county deals with a division of land which for his purpose is accidental and arbitrary. The phrase Roman Northamptonshire is convenient, but strictly speaking it is a contradiction in terms. We can describe, as we shall presently do, the Roman remains found in our county, but we do so not because it is scientific, but because it is convenient. The topographical history and the topographical literature of our island is grouped so largely by counties that we can hardly treat the Roman antiquities on any other basis. But all the while we shall be dealing with an area which for our purpose has no meaning or unity. We can describe it ; we cannot write its history. These facts make it desirable to diverge a little from the plan followed by most county historians. Hitherto it has been customary to narrate the chief events recorded by ancient writers as occurring in Roman Britain, and to point out which of these events took place or might be imagined to have taken place within the county. The result is always to leave on the reader an impression that somehow or other the county possessed in Roman times a local individuality and a local history. In the following pages we shall adopt a different method. Utilizing the abundant archaeological evidence, now far better known and understood than a hundred years ago, we shall first sketch briefly the general character of Roman Britain and we shall then proceed to describe in detail the actual antiquities and to point out how far they agree with this general character, how far (in other words) the district now called Northamptonshire was an average bit of the Roman province. The Roman occupation was commenced by the Emperor Claudius in A.D, 43. At first its progress was rapid. Kent and Essex were seized in a few weeks ; then the army of invasion seems to have divided into three divisions, the Second Legion moving south-west towards Somerset and Devon, the Fourteenth and Twentieth Legions north-west towards Shrewsbury and Chester, the Ninth Legion north towards Lincoln. We have in Northamptonshire some remains which may be faint traces of the operations of the Ninth and Twentieth Legions ; to these we shall return below (in sec. 7). The result was that within three 158
