Early Britain—Roman BritainConybeare, John William Edward
History
Early Britain—Roman Britain
Conybeare, John William Edward
Great Britain -- History -- Roman period, 55 B.C.-449 A.D.
G. 3.--The Atrebates, who play a not unimportant part (as will be
seen in the next chapter) in Caesar's connection with Britain, were
apparently in possession of the whole southern bank of the Thames,
from its source right down to London--the river then, as in
Anglo-Saxon times, being a tribal boundary throughout its entire
length. This would make the Bibroci a sub-tribe of the Atrebatian
Name, and also the Segontiaci, if Henry of Huntingdon (writing in the
12th century with access to various sources of information now lost)
is right in identifying Silchester, the Roman _Calleva_, with their
local stronghold Caer Segent.
G. 4.--But the whole attempt to locate accurately any but the chiefest
tribes found by the Romans in Britain is too conjectural to be
worth the infinite labour that has been expended upon the subject by
antiquaries. All we can say with certainty is that forest and fen
must have cut up the land into a limited number of fairly recognizable
districts, each so far naturally separated from the rest as to have
been probably a separate or quasi-separate political entity also.
Thus, not only was the Thames a line of demarcation, only passable
at a few points, from its estuary nearly to the Severn Sea, but the
southern regions cut off by it were parted by Nature into five main
districts. Sussex was hemmed in by the great forest of Anderida, and
that of Selwood continued the line from Southampton to Bristol.
Kent was isolated by the Romney marshes and the wild country about
Tunbridge, while the western peninsula was a peninsula indeed when
the sea ran up to beyond Glastonbury. In this region, then, the later
Wessex, we find five main tribes; the men of Kent, the Regni south of
the Weald, the Atrebates along the Thames, the Belgae on the Wiltshire
Avon, and the Damnonii of Devon and Cornwall, with (perhaps) a
sub-tribe of their Name, the Durotriges, in Dorsetshire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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