The Romans taught the Britons many useful trades. 'Veratinum' or Wilderspool became under the Romans quite a busy manufacturing town, the forerunner of a modern Warrington or Wigan. The site of the ancient Roman town has been carefully dug over. Traces have been found of many pits, hearths, furnaces, and ovens for the manufacture of glass and pottery, a bronze foundry, and an iron smelting furnace, and an enameller's workshop. In the museums at Warrington and at Stockport are many fragments of pottery found here. Most of it is of a rough brown-red ware, called 'rough-cast', of which the commoner utensils, water-jugs and bowls and funeral urns, were made. A more ornamental kind is called 'Samian', and is of a darker colour, highly glazed and decorated with embossed figures of men and animals. Many articles of iron, knives, padlocks, keys, nails, found on the same spot show that Veratinum was the Birmingham of the Roman occupation. Roman coins have been dug up in large numbers at Chester and other sites along the Roman roads. Many of them are to be seen in Chester Town Hall and in our museums. Nearly all the emperors of the first four centuries are represented upon them. Several emperors came to Britain, and we may be sure that in their tours of inspection they paid visits to the important garrison city of the 'great legion'. Some of these coins bear the name of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, who was born at York, and whose mother was perhaps a lady of British birth. There is unfortunately nothing to show that there was any Christian church in Roman Cheshire, though many of the Roman soldiers must have been familiar with the Christian faith. Romans who became Christians were allowed to worship in the basilica, which in after days, as we shall see, became the model upon which Christian churches were built. On a house near the East Gate of Chester are carved these words: 'The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life.' This is the translation of an inscription on a Roman coin found when the workmen were digging the foundations of the building. The coins of the Emperor Magnentius show the monogram of the first two letters of Christ. The Roman rule lasted for 370 years. During this period they had transformed a desolate and barren land, inhabited by a people that were almost savages, into a fertile and prosperous province; Britannia Felix the Romans themselves called it. Large tracts of forest land were cleared and brought under cultivation. Britain became one of the chief granaries of Rome. In the museums you may see the Roman querns or handmills with which they ground their corn.