Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/517

Rh Under the Romans Britain became a corn-producing and grain exporting agricultural country, like the America of our own day. And just as the valley of the St. Lawrence and the northern Mississippi basin now form the most important wheat-growing part of America, so the valleys of the greater rivers formed the most important part of Roman Britain. The plain of York, formed by the Ouse and other tributaries of the Humber, is the largest low-lying corn-field and meadow-land in our country. It consists mainly of triassic strata, overlaid in the lower reaches by a deep bed of alluvium. In the center of this rich agricultural tract lay the Roman provincial capital of Eboracum. Another wealthy region is the post-tertiary level of the eastern counties; and here the colony of Camalodunum lay surrounded by numerous villas of rich land-owners. The tertiary valley of the Thames shows its importance by including the considerable cities of Londinium, Verulamium, and Rhutupite. Other Roman towns—Lincoln, Cirencester, Bath, and Dorchester—filled up the rich oölitic and green-sand belt of central England; while Winchester overlooked the tertiary vale of the Itchin at Southampton, and took its name of Venta Belgarum from the-agricultural lowland at its doors. We may gather from the Roman historians that the occupation of southeastern Britain was real and thorough. The native population was reduced to serfdom, and the country became a mere feeder of Rome or of the Gallic cities.

Primary Britain, however, seems never to have fallen into so miserable a condition. The Roman supremacy was here probably confined to a mere military occupation, like our own occupation of Kumaon or the Simla Hills. Caledonia never fell into their hands, and even in Wales and the Pennine chain we find only military stations, like Isca Silurum or Segontium, not large cities like London, York, and Lincoln. Even where the Romans thoroughly penetrated the primary region, as in Cornwall or the Forest of Dean, it was always for a geological reason, to secure the mines of tin or iron. This difference, I believe, had almost as much to do as geographical position with the subsequent relations of the Britons to the English invaders. While the servile herd of the Belgian, Icenian, Trinobantian, and Brigantian country, demoralized by Roman centralization, fell easily before the Jutish or Anglian pirates, the more independent mountaineers of Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde long resisted the English onslaught, and only at last succumbed as free subject races, instead of being enslaved or exterminated like their eastern fellow countrymen. The Scottish Highlands not only retained their own independence, but even gave their kings to the Teutonic Lothians. Granite naturally makes freemen, as alluvium naturally makes slaves.

When the English settled in southeastern Britain, they occupied for the most part the secondary and tertiary plain. But they also pushed northward into the primary region up to the Firth of Forth, as