all classes, and the educated classes outside the towns, seem to have used Latin. At Silchester, for instance, we meet on broken tiles or potsherds various brief scribblings in the Latin tongue which are the work of labourers or of domestic servants, while similar scribblings in Celtic are wholly absent. We cannot help concluding that the labourers and servants spoke and wrote Latin.
   On the side of material civilization the Roman influence reigned no less supreme. Before the Roman period there had existed in Britain a Late Celtic art of much merit, working especially in metal, and distinguished for its fantastic use of plant and animal forms, its love for the geometrical ornament known as the ‘returning spiral,’ and its enamelling (fig. 2). It was a true art. Though incapable of portraying the human figure, and though confined almost entirely to the decoration of useful objects—collars, brooches, sword-handles, shields—it exhibits a lively originality in dealing with its own conventions, a delicate, if sometimes

rather quaint sense of beauty, and a genuine delight in the ornamentation of every detail, which are rare in the world before the Middle Ages. This art, though it flared up for a last brilliant moment in the half-century following the conquest, was ultimately almost extinguished by the Roman. Occasionally, indeed, as in the potteries of the New Forest and of Castor, near Peterborough, its influence can still be traced in the third or fourth centuries. But even these survivals became modified by Roman influences, and whenever they are modified—for instance, when the local potters admit scenes from classical mythology into their repertory—they lose their vigour. In general, the Late Celtic art suffered the fate which befalls

Fig. 2  Tankard from Elvenden (Co. Suffolk) showing Late Celtic Art

every picturesque semi-civilized art which is confronted by an organized and coherent culture.
   Almost every feature in Romano-British life was Roman. The commonest good pottery, the red sealing-wax-like ware called Samian or Terra Sigillata, copied from an Italian original, was made in Gaul or Germany, and was purely classical in outline and ornament. The mosaics and frescoes which adorned the houses and public buildings, the hypocausts which warmed them, the bathrooms which added to their luxury, were all alike borrowed from Italy. Nor are these importations confined to the mansions of the