3. It is, however, partly in reliance on such negative evidence that we venture to assert that the Roman occupation of Britain was before all things a military occupation, and that they either did not attempt, or did not succeed in the attempt, largely to win over the inhabitants to their own ways and to accustom them to that civic life which had been the cradle of their own civilisation. In Italy itself, in Gaul and in most of the provinces of western Europe we find abundant evidence of the municipalisation of the conquered tribes. “Decurio” and “Duumvir,” which we may represent by town councillor and mayor, are indications of rank which we meet with continually on provincial tombstones in those countries; but in Britain amid the crowd of inscriptions to centurions, tribunes and other military officers who served here we meet with only one here and there to civic dignitaries. “The highest form of town life known to the Romans was naturally rare in Britain. The _coloniæ_ and _municipia_, the privileged municipalities, with institutions on the Italian model, which mark the supreme development of Roman political civilisation in the provinces, were not common in Britain. We know only of five: Colchester, Lincoln, Gloucester, and York were _coloniæ_, Verulam probably a _municipium_, and despite their legal rank none of these could count among the greater cities of the empire. Four of them, indeed, probably owed their existence not to any development of Britain but to the need of providing for time-expired soldiers discharged from the army.”[24] There was, of course, a certain number of towns such as Londinium which had sprung out of pre-Roman settlements, some of which no doubt grew and prospered exceedingly with the growth of commerce due to the prevalence of “the Roman peace,” but these towns were apparently not modelled on the Roman pattern, and what may have been the nature of their institutions can only be a matter of conjecture.