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 ROMANO-BRITISH NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Roman days some faint traditions of the old native Celtic art. In short, the antiquities of our county present to us, fully and freely, the features which characterized the ordinary settled life of Roman Britain, and they add one feature which is less usual, the survival of Celtic traditions in art. We have before us a typical area, varying only in one small individual trait. But to these details, which exemplify the permanent and regular life of the district as it was through two or three centuries, we must append one more of a different nature. We shall not be able to conclude our survey without noticing some vestiges — partly real, partly (I fear) imaginary — of the military operations by which Roman Britain was first conquered. These vestiges are not characteristic of the district : their presence in it is accidental, and their date is a special and transitory period. Therefore we place them at the end of our survey, outside the limits of the normal civilization which we shall first describe. This normal civilization however was not equally developed over all parts of Northamptonshire. The eastern end of the county differed markedly in this respect from the centre and west. In the east we find something like a real town, a flourishing industry, and signs of wealth and luxury. In the centre and west the towns are hardly more than villages, and evidences of high civilization are scanty. This is not mere chance. The eastern part of our county belongs to the region of the fens and the hills adjoining them ; the west and centre belong to the midlands, and in the Roman period the civilization of the midlands was lower than that of the surrounding districts. In the latter we meet striking developments of Romano-British life ; for instance, a ring of country towns, Verulam, Chesterford, Castor, Wroxeter, Gloucester, Cirencester, Silchester, each in its degree a place of note. The midland area contained no such elements. Except Leicester, its towns were far too small to be matched with any of those just named ; indeed, they are hardly towns at all, and the whole Romano-British life of the region was simple and plain, and devoid of character and salient features. The reason for this may perhaps be found in physical facts. The midlands, though often described by geographers as the central plain of our island, are not in reality a plain in the ordinary sense of that word. They form a complex district which is especially notable for the low scale and small size of its various physical features. Little of it is flat, but it has no high hills or distinct ranges. Woods abound in it, but there are no continuous tracts of forest. Many rivers rise within it, but they reach no size till they have passed its borders ; their valleys are small and shallow, and even their watersheds are faint and ill-defined. It is a pleasant land, alike to those that dwell in it and those that wander through it, but it contains very httle that might aid the growth of large towns or of an extensive agricultural population. Its mineral wealth attracts a dense throng of inhabitants to one part of it to-day, but that wealth was unknown in the Roman period. Then too the woods were perhaps thicker than now, and the little valleys less carefully drained. It is not hard to understand why the midlands, and among 165