The Romanization of Roman Britain Romanization in Language byHaverfield, F.
We may now proceed to survey the actual remains. They may seem scanty,
but they deserve examination.
First, in respect of language. Even before the Claudian conquest of A.D.
43, British princes had begun to inscribe their coins with Latin words.
These legends are not merely blind and unintelligent copies, like the
imitations of Roman legends on the early English sceattas. The word
most often used, REX, is strange to the Roman coinage, and must have
been employed with a real sense of its meaning. After A.D. 43, Latin
advanced rapidly. No Celtic inscription occurs, I believe, on any
monument of the Roman period in Britain, neither cut on stone nor
scratched on tile or potsherd, and this fact is the more noteworthy
because, as I shall point out below, Celtic inscriptions are not at all
unknown in Gaul. On the other hand, Roman inscriptions occur freely in
Britain. They are less common than in many other provinces, and they
abound most in the military region. But they appear also in towns and
country-houses, and some of the instances are significant.
The town site that we can best examine for our present purpose is
Calleva or Silchester, ten miles south of Reading, which has been
completely excavated with care and thoroughness. Here a few fairly
complete inscriptions on stone have been discovered, and many fragments
of others, which prove that the public language of the town was
Latin.1 The speech of ordinary conversation is equally well
attested by smaller inscribed objects, and the evidence is remarkable,
since it plainly refers to the lower class of Callevans. When a weary
brick-maker scrawls SATIS with his finger on a tile, or some prouder
spirit writes CLEMENTINVS FECIT TVBVL(um) (Clementinus made this
box-tile), when a bit of Samian is marked FVR--presumably as a warning
from the servants of one house to those of the next--or a rude brick
shows the word PVELLAM--probably part of an amatory sentence otherwise
lost--or another brick gives a Roman date, the 'sixth day before the
Calends of October', we may be sure that the lower classes of Calleva
used Latin alike at their work and in their more frivolous moments
(Figs. 2, 3, 4). When we find a tile scratched over with cursive
lettering--possibly part of a writing lesson--which ends with a tag from
the Aeneid, we recognize that not even Vergil was out of place
here.2 The Silchester examples are so numerous and remarkable that
they admit of no other interpretation.3
[Footnote 1: For these and for the following graffiti see my account
in the Victoria History of Hampshire, i. 275, 282-4. For the
'Clementinus' tile (discovered since) see Archaeologia, lviii. 30.
Silchester lies in a stoneless country, so that stone inscriptions would
naturally be few and would easily be used up for later building.
Moreover, its cemeteries have not yet been explored, and only one
tombstone has come accidentally to light.]
[Footnote 2: Sir E.M. Thompson, Greek and Latin Palaeography (1894),
p. 211, first suggested this explanation; Eph. ix. 1293.]
[Footnote 3: To call them--as did a kindly Belgian critic of this paper
in its first published form--'un nombre de faits trop peu considérable'
is really to misstate the case.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 2. ... puellam.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 3. Fecit tubul(um) Clementinus.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 4. vi K(alendas) Oct(obres)....]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIGS. 2, 3, 4. GRAFFITI ON TILES FROM SILCHESTER. (P.
25.)]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 5. GRAFFITO ON A TILE FOUND AT SILCHESTER (P. 25).
Pertacus perfidus campester Lucilianus Campanus conticuere omnes.
(Probably a writing lesson.)]
I have heard this conclusion doubted on the ground that a bricklayer or
domestic servant in a province of the Roman Empire would not have known
how to read and write. This doubt really rests on a misconception of the
Empire. It is, indeed, akin to the surprise which tourists often exhibit
when confronted with Roman remains in an excavation or a museum--a
surprise that 'the Romans' had boots, or beds, or waterpipes, or
fireplaces, or roofs over their heads. There are, in truth, abundant
evidences that the labouring man in Roman days knew how to read and
write at need, and there is much truth in the remark that in the lands
ruled by Rome education was better under the Empire than at any time
since its fall till the nineteenth century.
It has, indeed, been suggested by doubters, that these graffiti were
written by immigrant Italians, working as labourers or servants in
Calleva. The suggestion does not seem probable. Italians certainly
emigrated to the provinces in considerable numbers, just as Italians
emigrate to-day. But we have seen above that the ancient emigrants were
not labourers, as they are to-day. They were traders, or dealers in
land, or money-lenders or other 'well-to-do' persons. The labourers and
servants of Calleva must be sought among the native population, and the
graffiti testify that this population wrote Latin. It is a further
question whether, besides writing Latin, the Callevan servants and
workmen may not also have spoken Celtic. Here direct evidence fails. In
the nature of things, we cannot hope for proof of the negative
proposition that Celtic was not spoken in Silchester. But all
probabilities suggest that it was, at any rate, spoken very little. In
the twenty years' excavation of the site, no Celtic inscription has
emerged. Instead, we have proof that the lower classes wrote Latin for
all sorts of purposes. Had they known Celtic well, it is hardly credible
that they should not have sometimes written in that language, as the
Gauls did across the Channel. A Gaulish potter of Roman date could
scrawl his name and record, Sacrillos avot, 'Sacrillus potter', on the
outside of a mould.1 No such scrawl has ever been found in Britain.
The Gauls, again, could invent a special letter Ð to denote a special
Celtic sound and keep it in Roman times. No such letter was used in
Roman Britain, though it occurs on earlier British coins. This total
absence of written Celtic cannot be a mere accident.
[Footnote 1: One example is Sacrillos avot form., suggesting a
bilingual sentence such as we find in some Cornish documents of the
period when Cornish was definitely giving way to English. Another
example, Valens avoti (Déchelette, Vases céramiques, i. 302),
suggests the same stage of development in a different way.]
No other Romano-British town has been excavated so extensively or so
scientifically as Silchester. None, therefore, has yielded so much
evidence. But we have no reason to consider Silchester exceptional in
its character. Such scraps as we possess from other sites point to
similar Romanization elsewhere. FVR, for instance, recurs on a potsherd
from the Romano-British country town at Dorchester in Dorset. A set of
tiles dug up in the ruins of a country-house at Plaxtol, in Kent, bear a
Roman inscription impressed by a rude wooden stamp (Fig. 6).1 In
short, all the graffiti on potsherds or tiles that are known to me as
found in towns or country-houses are equally Roman. Larger inscriptions,
cut on stone, have also been found in country-houses. On the whole the
general result is clear. Latin was employed freely in the towns of
Britain, not only on serious occasions or by the upper classes, but by
servants and work-people for the most accidental purposes. It was also
used, at least by the upper classes, in the country. Plainly there did
not exist in the towns that linguistic gulf between upper class and
lower class which can be seen to-day in many cities of eastern Europe,
where the employers speak one language and the employed another. On the
other hand, it is possible that a different division existed, one which
is perhaps in general rarer, but which can, or could, be paralleled in
some Slavonic districts of Austria-Hungary. That is, the townsfolk of
all ranks and the upper class in the country may have spoken Latin,
while the peasantry may have used Celtic. No actual evidence has been
discovered to prove this. We may, however, suggest that it is not, in
itself, an impossible or even an improbable linguistic division of Roman
Britain, even though the province did not contain any such racial
differences as those of German, Pole, Ruthene and Rouman which lend so
much interest to Austrian towns like Czernowitz.
[Footnote 1: Proc. Soc. Antiq. London, xxiii. 108; Eph. ix. 1290.]
[Illustration REMOVED: FIG. 6. FRAGMENT OF INSCRIBED TILE FROM PLAXTOL AND
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE INSCRIPTION FROM VARIOUS FRAGMENTS. (The letters
were impressed by a wooden cylinder with incised lettering, which was
rolled over the tile while still soft. In the reconstruction CAB in line
2 and IT in line 3 are included twice, to show the method of
repetition.)]
It remains to cite the literary evidence, distinct if not abundant, as
to the employment of Latin in Britain. Agricola, as is well known,
encouraged the use of it, with the result (says Tacitus) that the
Britons, who had hitherto hated and refused the foreign tongue, became
eager to speak it fluently. About the same time Plutarch, in his tract
on the cessation of oracles, mentions one Demetrius of Tarsus,
grammarian, who had been teaching in Britain (A.D. 80), and mentions him
as nothing at all out of the ordinary course.1 Forty years later,
Juvenal alludes casually to British lawyers taught by Gaulish
schoolmasters. It is plain that by the second century Latin must have
been spreading widely in the province. We need not feel puzzled about
the way in which the Callevan workman of perhaps the third or fourth
century learnt his Latin.
[Footnote 1: See Dessau, Hermes, xlvi. 156.]
At this point we might wish to introduce the arguments deducible from
philology. We might ask whether the phonetics or the vocabulary of the
later Celtic and English languages reveal any traces of the influence of
Latin, as a spoken tongue, or give negative testimony to its absence.
Unfortunately, the inquiry seems almost hopeless. The facts are obscure
and open to dispute, and the conclusions to be drawn from them are quite
uncertain. Dogmatic assertions proceeding from this or that philologist
are common enough. Trustworthy results are correspondingly scarce. One
instance may be cited in illustration. It has been argued that the name
'Kent' is derived from the Celtic 'Cantion', and not from the Latin
'Cantium', because, according to the rules of Vulgar Latin, 'Cantium'
would have been pronounced 'Cantsium' in the fifth century, when the
Saxons may be supposed to have learnt the name. That is, Celtic was
spoken in Kent about 450. Yet it is doubtful whether Latin 'ti' had
really come to be pronounced 'tsi' in Britain so early as A.D. 450. And
it is plainly possible that the Saxons may have learnt the name long
years before the reputed date of Hengist and Horsa. The Kentish coast
was armed against them and the organization of the 'Saxon Shore'
established about A.D. 300. Their knowledge of the place-name may be at
least as old. No other difficulty seems to hinder the derivation of
'Kent' from the form 'Cantium', and the whole argument based on the name
thus collapses. It is impossible here to go through the whole list of
cases which have been supposed to be parallel in their origin to 'Kent',
nor should I, with a scanty knowledge of the subject, be justified in
such an attempt. I have selected this particular example because it has
been emphasized by a recent writer.1
[Footnote 1: Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 102. I am indebted
to Mr. W.H. Stevenson for help in relation to these philological
points.]
