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ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION
From language we pass to material civilization. Here is a far wider
field of evidence, provided by buildings, private or public, their
equipment and furniture, and the arts and small artistic or decorative
objects. On the whole this evidence is clear and consistent. The
material civilization of the province, the external fabric of its life,
was Roman, in Britain as elsewhere in the west. Native elements
succumbed almost wholesale to the conquering foreign influence. In
regard to public buildings this is natural enough. Before the Claudian
conquest the Britons can hardly have possessed large structures in
stone, and the provision of them necessarily came in with the Romans.
The fora, basilicas, and public baths, such as have been discovered at
Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, follow Roman models and resemble
similar buildings in other provinces. The temples show something more of
a local pattern (Fig. 7), which occurs also in northern Gaul and on the
Rhine, but this pattern seems merely a variation of a classical type.[1]
The characteristics of the private houses are more complicated. Their
ground-plans show us types which, like the temples just mentioned, recur
in northern Gaul as well as Britain, but which differ even more than the
temples from the similar buildings in Italy, or indeed in the
Mediterranean provinces of the Empire. The houses of Italy and of the
south generally were constructed to look inwards upon open impluvia,
colonnaded courts and garden plots, and, as befitted a hot climate, they
had few outer windows. Moreover, they could be easily built side by side
so as to form, as at Pompeii, the continuous streets of a town. The
houses of Britain and northern Gaul looked outwards on to the
surrounding country. Their rooms were generally arranged in straight
rows along a corridor or cloister. Sometimes they had only one row of
rooms (Corridor House, Fig. 8); sometimes they enclosed two or three
sides of a large open yard (Courtyard House, Fig. 9); a third type
somewhat resembles a yard with rooms at each end of it. In any case they
were singularly ill-suited to stand side by side in a town street. When
we find them grouped together in a town, as at Silchester and
Caerwent--the only two examples of Roman towns in Britain of which we
have real knowledge--they are dotted about more like the cottages in an
English village than anything that recalls a real town (Fig. 10).
[Footnote 1: British examples have been noted at Silchester and
Caerwent, and in many scattered sites in rural districts. For Gaulish
instances, see Léon de Vesly, Les Fana de région Normande (Rouen,
1909); for Germany, Bonner Jahrbücher, 1876, p. 57, Hettner, Drei
Tempelbezirke im Trevirerlande (Trier, 1901), and _Trierer
Jahresberichte, iii. 49-66. The English writers who have published
accounts of these structures have tended to ignore their special
character.]
[Illustration: FIG. 7. GROUND-PLANS OF ROMANO-BRITISH TEMPLES. CAERWENT
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