are scattered all over the southern counties of England,[21] far too closely adjacent one to another to allow us to think of the life of Britain as “mainly military,” or to look upon Britain as “a Roman Algeria.”[22] It would be absurd to suppose that these villas were all the residences of wealthy officers or of provincials who derived their income from official emoluments. We should be justified, even if we had no direct information, in supposing that the _villa_ meant in Britain very much what it meant in Gaul and elsewhere; but, as it chances, a decree of Constantine of the year 319 does actually mention _coloni_ and _tributarii_ as present in England;[23] and both these terms indicate classes which, whether technically free or not, were none the less dependent on a lord and bound to the soil. And we can readily see how such a class would grow up. Some of the _coloni_ may, as in Italy, have originally been free leaseholders, who had fallen into arrears in the payment of their rent. But there is no necessity for such a supposition. Among the Gauls, as Cæsar tells us, the only classes held in honour were the druids and the knights (equites). “The people” (plebes), he says, “are regarded in much the same light as slaves, without any initiative or voice in public affairs; and many of them are forced by debt, or the pressure of taxation, or even by violence, actually to become the slaves of the more powerful.”[24] In all probability the Romans found “knights” and “people” in the same relative position in Britain; and, indeed, when the unconquered tribes of Ireland and Wales come within the ken of history we find among them a large class of servile cultivators below the free tribesmen.[25] Whatever may have happened to the “knights,” the “people” would easily become serfs bound to the soil on the various villas. Then, again, it must be noticed that it was the constant policy of the Roman emperors to provide for the needs both of agriculture and of military service by transporting conquered barbarians to distant provinces, and settling them on vacant or uncultivated lands. M. Fustel de Coulanges in his _Recherches_[26] shows that these barbarians were by no means turned into peasant proprietors; they became tenants, bound to the soil, upon the imperial domains or the estates of great proprietors. Britain enjoyed its share of the fruits of this policy; for in the later part of the second century Antoninus sent to Britain a number of Marcomanni; a century later, Probus transported hither a number of Burgundians and Vandals; and Valentinian, still a century later, sent a tribe of the Alamanni.[27] There is, therefore, no difficulty in accounting for the growth of a population of prædial serfs during the period of Roman rule.