Devon (England) -- Social life and customs; Wreyland (England)
Apart from coins, there are few relics of the Romans in any part of
Devon excepting Exeter; and the coins may only prove that there was
plundering or trade. A century before the Romans came, Diodoros was
writing (V. 22) of the natives of these parts as kindly, mannerly folk,
accustomed to dealing with foreigners over their trade in tin. Such
people would make good neighbours, and could be left alone. At the date
of the Antonine Itinerary the Roman roads did not come further west than
Exeter, and probably were not carried on to Land’s End until the reign
of Constantine--his name is on a Roman mile-stone at Saint Hilary, and
his colleague’s name, Licinius, is on another at Tintagel. That was more
than 250 years after Britain was annexed by Claudius; and the wonder is
that the Romans did not make the road before, or that having left it for
so long, they should have made it then. Something must have happened
just before to give occasion for it; and I would hazard a guess that
‘something’ was the subjugation of Britain by Constantius in 296 A.D.
after Carausius and Allectus had held the country for nine years.
The natives here were probably Iberians or Celtiberians, that is, wholly
or partly of the old stock that the Celtic immigrants pushed back into
the west. Tacitus observes in his _Agricola_, II, that the people in the
west of Britain were so like Iberians that anyone would think their
ancestors had come from Spain. He wrote this in 98 A.D., and would have
heard it from Agricola himself, who was many years in Britain. No doubt,
there was a likeness; but there is another explanation of it--the
Iberians had once migrated westward like the Celts, and some of them
migrated into Britain and others into Spain. That seems more likely than
migration here from Spain.
In the Colonies and India there are races quite impervious to our
civilization and living in their own ancestral way; and I imagine that
these natives lived their own lives here regardless of the way the
Romans lived. They were Prehistoric in the sense that they were living
like primeval ancestors of theirs whose history is unknown; but they
were not Prehistoric in the sense of having lived in that far past
themselves, nor are their implements and buildings Prehistoric in that
sense. Yet enormous dates B.C. are given to Prehistoric remains here
which may not be much earlier than 300 A.D., or even as old as that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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