England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both
those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed
the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness
which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous
winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they
treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local
pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to
take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the
singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before
Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of
Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some
years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the
time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the
Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say,
northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had
been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its
great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards,
though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow
grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and
one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of
consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all
stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is
responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)
But side by side with the growth of a gracious civilisation in England,
there was constant warfare on the borders. The wilder natives of the
British islands refused the Roman sway, and threatened by their forays the
security of the new cities. This made necessary a great military
organisation, which has left its mark on the England of to-day in the Roman
roads and the sites of Roman military camps dotted all over the country
from the Thames to the Tweed. The remains of these camps are quite
distinguishable in many places; and generally they are known as "Cæsar's
camps," whether Julius Cæsar ever saw their neighbourhood or not. Probably
Carausius was the "Cæsar" of many of these camps.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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