Page:VCH Worcestershire 1.djvu/260

A HISTORY OF WORCESTERSHIRE and Rochester in Kent ; Dorchester and Exeter, Cirencester, Leicester, and far in the north Aldborough 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 resembled 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 formed for the most part sheep runs and corn land, and supplied the cloth and wheat which are occa- sionally mentioned by ancient writers as products of the province during the later Imperial period. The landowners may have been to some extent immigrant Italians, but it can hardly be doubted that, as in Gaul, they were mostly the Romanized upper classes of the natives. The common assertion that they were Roman officers or officials may be set aside as rarely if ever correct. The peasantry who worked on these estates or were otherwise occupied in the country lived in rude hamlets, sometimes in pit-dwellings, sometimes in huts, with few circumstances of comfort or pleasure. Their civilization however, as we have said, was Roman in all such matters as the better objects in common use or the warming and decoration of the houses. One feature, not a prominent one, remains to be noticed — trade and industry. We should perhaps place first the agricultural industry, which produced wheat and wool. Both were exported in the fourth century, and the export of wheat to the towns of the lower Rhine is mentioned by an ancient writer as considerable. Unfortunately the details of this agriculture are almost unknown : perhaps we shall be able to estimate it better when the Romano-British ' villas ' have been better explored. Rather more traces have survived of the lead mining and iron mining, which at least during the first two centuries of our era was carried on with some vigour in half a dozen districts — lead on Mendip, in Shropshire, Flintshire and Derbyshire ; iron in the Weald and the Forest of Dean. Other minerals were less important. The gold men- tioned by Tacitus proved very scanty, and the far-famed Cornish tin seems (according to present evidence) to have been worked comparatively little and late in the Roman occupation. The chief commercial town was from the earliest times Londinium (London), a place of some size and wealth, and perhaps the residence of the chief authorities who controlled taxes and customs dues. Finally let us sketch the roads. We may distinguish four groups all commencing from one centre, London. One road ran south-east to Canterbury and the Kentish ports. A second ran west and south-west from London to Silchester, and thence by ramifications to Winchester, Dorchester and Exeter, Bath, Gloucester and South Wales. A third, Watling Street, ran north-west across the Midlands to Wroxeter, and thence to the military districts of the north-west ; it also gave access to Leicester and the north. A fourth ran to Colchester and the eastern counties, and also to Lincoln and York and the mihtary districts of the 202