Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/77

 1920 FRANCIS HAVERFIELD 69 as a Creighton lecture in 1910 and subsequently published as a separate monograph. He went in fuller detail into the subject of art in a paper on ' Representative Examples of Romano- British Sculpture ', written in collaboration with Mr. Stuart- Jones, and published in volume ii of the Journal of Roman Studies. He considered art rather from the historical than from the aesthetic point of view, and as illustrating the interaction of Roman culture and native civilization. That theme formed the subject of his brilliant lecture on the ' Romanization of Roman Britain '. First, Romanization in general [he wrote] extinguished the distinction between Roman and provincial, alike in politics, in material culture, and in language. Secondly, it did not everywhere and at once destroy all traces of tribal or national sentiments or fashions. These remained, at least for a while and in a few districts, not so much in active opposition as in latent persistence, capable of resurrection under the proper con- ditions. In such cases the provincial had become a Roman. But he could still undergo an atavistic reversion to the ancient ways of his fore^ fathers.^ Had he lived to write a general account of Roman Britain, we may be sure that he would have made it a history of Roman civilization ; chronological narrative would have occupied a sub- ordinate place. Not that he neglected the sequence of events : in scattered articles he discussed and threw new light on the course of the Roman conquest of the midlands, the campaigns of Agri- cola,^ the rising of the Brigantes in the reign of Pius, the length of the Roman occupation of Scotland, the Irish incursions up the Bristol Channel, and the fortification of the eastern coast in the last years of Roman rule. But a consecutive story, based upon historical texts, seemed to him neither to be feasible nor worth attempting. As he said towards the end of his life, ' The more I study the ordinary written materials, the harder I find it to learn the truth from them ; the more often I feel that the story which they tell is not the story which is worth telling '.3 And there was a further and yet more serious obstacle to writing a history of Roman Britain. In his minutest archaeo- logical studies (' there are no trifles in archaeology ' was one of his aphorisms), he viewed the thing he was studying as a mani- festation of the life and civilization of a great empire. He regarded Roman Britain not as a stage of English history, but as an outlying province of Rome. ' Romanization of Roman Britain, 3rd edition, p. 18. ^ He long worked on an edition of the Agricola of Tacitus : this is in course of publication. ' Journal of Roman Studies, vol. i, p xvi.