vestiges of Roman occupation. Moreover, the river-valleys of the Medway and the Darent are likewise lined with the scattered stone buildings which we may ascribe to the more prosperous farming gentry, and with the less definite evidences indicative rather of peasant occupation. In these valleys, as along the Watling Street, there are suggestions here and there of local concentrations which, without attributing to them any special corporate status, we may provisionally describe as villages or minor towns. And away from the Watling Street and the valleys, a few open and accessible regions—notably Thanet— seem to have borne small communities which are here relegated, without prejudice, to the Topographical Index rather than to the present section.
   If, under these circumstances, our present selection of these sites from a multitude of potential claimants ³  is often necessarily arbitrary, it is possible in one or two cases to summon to our aid the evidence of the Antonine Itinerary or of the Peutinger Table. The mysterious Noviomagus which intrudes into the second Itinerary of Antonine still baffles identification; but the settlement which grew up beside the Watling Street at the crossing of the Darent valley may safely lay claim to the name of Vagniacae, whilst Durolevum, though less securely vouched for, lay probably within the vicinity of Faversham. It may be supposed that places such as these, singled out for special mention in the Roman road-book, were at least capable of supplying the needs of man and beast and, as such, were doubtless also small market-towns with something of an urban status, if on a poor scale.
   On the whole, our picture of northern Kent in Roman times must be one of a busy, well-populated countryside in which no man was far from his neighbour.

2. CANTERBURY
   Canterbury lies in a small valley beside, and indeed amidst, the waters of the Stour, which here divide and flow in several channels through the north-eastern quarter of the modern town. The site is sheltered and pleasant. But it possesses no obvious natural advantages to explain why a town has grown up here. It can boast no great military strength or unusually fertile neighbourhood. In the Middle Ages, its shrine and its Continental traffic did much for it ; but the first of these forces did not exist in the Roman period, and, though the second may even then have counted for something, it can hardly have caused the origin of the place. It is, perhaps, worthy of note that, at or about Canterbury, the river-valley begins to broaden out into what was probably in Roman times a small estuary. Even until the 17th century coastal craft were able to penetrate to Fordwich, only two miles below the city. It may be, therefore, that the Roman town was placed as a convenient crossing and landing-point at the then navigable limit of the Stour. Otherwise we must admit that the first choice of this, as of many town-sites, was determined by factors which we cannot now discover.
   We are equally ignorant of the date when the site was first occupied. The Celtic name and tribal epithet which it bore during the Roman period ⁴  indicate a political relationship with the pre-Roman tribal administration.
    ³  See Topographical index, under Eccles, Upchurch, Rainham, Thanet (Westgate, Birchington, Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate, Pegwell, Minster and St. Lawrence), Deal and Walmer, Folkestone, etc.
   ⁴ See below, p. 63.