Page:VCH Norfolk 1.djvu/326

 A HISTORY OF NORFOLK ments and painted stuccoes which adorned the houses, the hypocausts which warmed them, and the bathrooms which increased their luxury, were all equally borrowed from Italy. Nor were these features confined to the mansions of the wealthy. Samian bowls and coarsely-coloured plaster and makeshift hypocausts occur even in poor~outlying hamlets. The material civilization of Roman Britain comprised few elements of splendour, but it was definitely Roman. This general character of the province may be recognized clearly in the town life which we find in it. The highest form of town life known to the Romans was naturally rare. The coloniae and municipia, the privileged municipalities with constitutions on the Italian model, which mark the supreme development of Roman political civilization in the provinces, were not common in Britain. We know only of five : Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester and York were coloniae, Verulam probably a municipium, and, despite their legal rank, none of these could count among the greater cities of the Empire. Four of them, indeed, probably owed their existence, not to any development of Britain, but to the need of providing for time-expired soldiers discharged from the army. On the other hand, many smaller towns reached some degree of municipal life, about which we cannot speak with certainty, but which was probably a lower type of town life than that of the coloniae and municipia. Originally (as it seems) Celtic tribal centres, these places grew into towns, just as the tribal centres of northern Gaul grew into towns, under the influence of Roman civilization. They were mostly small, but their sizes varied widely — from hardly twenty to more than two hundred acres. Strong walls protected them from external assault ; within, a forum, built on a Roman plan, provided, at least in the larger towns, accommodation for magistrates, traders, and idlers. What was the legal status of such a town, what town council or police it had, we do not know, but we can hardly doubt that some sort of town life existed there. Norfolk contains probably one instance of such a town, Caister, near Norwich ; others are Canterbury and Rochester, Silchester and Winchester, Cirencester and Leicester, and, far in the north. Aid- borough in the Vale of York. Outside these towns the country seems to have been principally divided up into estates, usually called ' villas,' and in this respect again Britain resembles northern Gaul. The ' villa ' was the property of a large landowner who lived in the ' great house,' if there was one, cul- tivated the land immediately round it (the demesne) by his slaves and let the rest to half-serf coloni. The estates doubtless varied in size as much as estates in all ages and countries. In Gaul they are said sometimes to have included eight or ten thousand acres, but we have no means of judging in Britain. They formed, for the most part, sheep runs and corn land, and supplied the cloth and wheat which are occasionally mentioned by ancient writers as products of the province during the later Imperial period. The landowners may have been to some extent immigrant Romans, but it can hardly be doubted that, as in Gaul, they 282