For generation after generation, the Romans sent legion after legion
of their soldiers into Britain. These legionaries were not all
Italians. They were recruited from various parts of the Roman Empire.
We know that one of the Roman emperors, holding command in Britain,
took a woman of British birth to wife, and that Constantine the Great
was their child. Are we asked to believe that the thousands upon
thousands of Roman legionaries in Britain lived a life of celibacy,
and left no descendants after them? The city of Lincoln was itself no
mere military station but a Roman colony, Lindi Colonia, and the
volume from which I quote shows that Lincolnshire has produced very
extensive traces of its Roman occupation, civil as well as military.
The county appears to have contained no fewer than six Roman military
stations, and was traversed by four Roman roads.
In the preceding lecture, I have alluded to that common illusion of
popular history through which people are led to imagine that the
migratory conquests of ancient times led to the extermination of the
older inhabitants by the newcomers. On this same illusion, lodged in
the mind of a man of scientific education, is based the notion that
the Roman occupation left no mark, in the ethnographical sense, on the
later population. We find the definite expression of this illusion in
the words in which the writer professes to account for the total
disappearance of the Celtic population of Lincolnshire, on whose
people, he says, still speaking ethnographically, the Celts have
probably left no impression. "The Brythons," he tells us, "fled
before the Roman advance." Bear well in mind that we are now on the
surer ground of history. The Roman conquest of Britain was completed
by Agricola in the year 80 of the Christian era. We have the account
of this conquest from a contemporary authority, Tacitus, who was
son-in-law to the conqueror, Agricola. In a remarkable passage,
Tacitus tells how the Britons behaved after Agricola had warred down
their pride:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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