Within the walls of the City were many large houses of the villa type as well as minor dwellings and streets of shops. Roach Smith speaks of such great houses about Crosby Square; he also describes a mosaic floor under Paternoster Row which extended 40 ft.; a second important floor on the site of India House, Leadenhall Street, was at least 22 ft. square, and may have been considerably more; a third large floor which was found under the Excise Office, Broad Street, was about 28 ft. square (probably 30 Roman ft.). All these must have been the floors of the chief central rooms of large houses of the villa type. Tite saw this of the Broad Street floor as his speaking of the “triclinium, other rooms, and the garden” shows. This Broad Street pavement was lying square with more modern walls surrounding it, and it may not be doubted that buildings continuously occupied the site. The supposition that there were important houses of the villa type within the walls of the City has been fully confirmed by the excavations at Silchester, and I may here quote Dr. Haverfield’s general conclusions as to Roman towns in Britain. “Roman British towns were of fair size, Roman London, perhaps even Roman Cirencester were larger than Roman Cologne or Bordeaux. They possessed, too, the buildings proper to a Roman town—town hall, market-place, public baths, chess-board street-plan, all of Roman fashion; they had also shops and temples and here and there a hotel.... The dwelling-houses in them were not town houses fitted to stand side by side to form regular streets; they were country houses, dotted about like cottages in a village. But in one way or another and to a real amount, Britain shared in that expansion of town life which formed a special achievement of the Roman Empire.” The evidence as to the isolation of the houses is here a little overstated, but in the main the passage gives a true impression. Fragments of wall decorations and mosaics found in Southwark suggest that there were big houses on that side of the river, and doubtless others occupied sites along the Strand and Holborn. [Illustration: FIG. 26. ] I give here a little sketch plan (Fig. 26) of a house found about a century since at Worplesdon, Surrey, from a survey at the Society of Antiquaries. This house is interesting as its unaltered plan gives an example of a simple “Corridor House.” It was 62 ft. long by 22½ ft. wide within the foundations, and faced west. The slight foundations of flint, not much more than a foot wide, show that the walls must have been of timbering or wattle work. The rooms and passage had floors of plain coarse tesseræ, except that the outer side of the passage had a simple twist border in mosaic. Possibly there had been some pattern in the central room as the floor was there missing, and a note reads: “Near this place was found the lozenge-shaped tessellated pavement.”