ROMANO-BRITISH NORTHAMPTONSHIRE But though the Romanization was thus tolerably complete, it must be further qualified as a Romanization on a low scale. The more elabo- rate and splendid and wealthy features of the Italian civilization, whether material or intellectual or administrative, were rare or even unknown in Britain. The finest objects of continental manufacture, glass and pottery and gold-work and the rest, came seldom to the island, and the objects of local fabric attained but seldom a high degree of merit. The choicer marbles and the finer statuary are still rarer and the mosaics are usually commonplace and undistinguished. Of Romano-British literature we have very little and that little owes its interest to other things than literary excellence. Of organized municipal or commercial or adminis- trative life we have but scanty traces. The civilization of Roman Britain was Roman, but it contained few elements of splendour or magnificence. We may distinguish in this civilization two local forms deserving special notice — the town and the villa. The towns of Roman Britain are not few, but as we might expect they are for the most part small. Many of them appear to have been originally Celtic tribal centres ; then under Roman influence they developed into towns, like the tribal centres in northern Gaul. Scarcely any seems to have attained any great size or wealth, according to the standard of the Empire. The highest form of town life known to the Roman was certainly rare in Britain : the colonice and municipia, the privileged municipalities with the Roman franchise and constitutions on the Italian model, were represented, so far as we know, by only five examples, the colonice of Colchester, Lincoln, York and Gloucester and the municipium of Verulam, and none of these could vie with the great municipalities of other provinces. But while lacking in size and magnificence, the towns of Roman Britain were in their way real towns ; if a modern term be allowed, we might best describe them as country towns. Most of them had walls, at least in the fourth century. Many of them had a forum built on the Roman plan, pro- viding in Roman fashion accommodation for magistrates, traders and idlers. Not only the colonice and municipium which were ruled by pre- scribed magistrates and town councils, but also the small places must be regarded as having some form of municipal life. Outside these towns the country seems to have been divided up into estates, known as ' villas,' and in this respect, as in its towns, Britain resembles northern Gaul. The villa was the property of a great land- owner, who inhabited the ' great house ' if there was one, cultivated the ground close to it by slaves, and let the rest to half-serf coloni. The villa in fact was the predecessor of the mediaeval manor. In Gaul some of the villas were estates of eight or ten thousand acres, and the land- owners' houses were splendid and sumptuous. In Britain we have no evidence to determine the size of the estates, and the houses — to which the term ' villa ' is often especially applied — seem rarely to have been very large. A few can vie with continental residences ; many are small and narrow. The landowners, as in Gaul, were doubtless the Romanized i6i
