a mere accident.

[Footnote 1: One example is _Sacrillos avot form._, suggesting a
bilingual sentence such as we find in some Cornish documents of the
period when Cornish was definitely giving way to English. Another
example, _Valens avoti_ (Dechelette, _Vases ceramiques_, i. 302),
suggests the same stage of development in a different way.]

No other Romano-British town has been excavated so extensively or so
scientifically as Silchester. None, therefore, has yielded so much
evidence. But we have no reason to consider Silchester exceptional in
its character. Such scraps as we possess from other sites point to
similar Romanization elsewhere. FVR, for instance, recurs on a potsherd
from the Romano-British country town at Dorchester in Dorset. A set of
tiles dug up in the ruins of a country-house at Plaxtol, in Kent, bear a
Roman inscription impressed by a rude wooden stamp (Fig. 6).[1] In
short, all the _graffiti_ on potsherds or tiles that are known to me as
found in towns or country-houses are equally Roman. Larger inscriptions,
cut on stone, have also been found in country-houses. On the whole the
general result is clear. Latin was employed freely in the towns of
Britain, not only on serious occasions or by the upper classes, but by
servants and work-people for the most accidental purposes. It was also
used, at least by the upper classes, in the country. Plainly there did
not exist in the towns that linguistic gulf between upper class and
lower class which can be seen to-day in many cities of eastern Europe,
where the employers speak one language and the employed another. On the
other hand, it is possible that a different division existed, one which
is perhaps in general rarer, but which can, or could, be paralleled in
some Slavonic districts of Austria-Hungary. That is, the townsfolk of
all ranks and the upper class in the country may have spoken Latin,
while the peasantry may have used Celtic. No actual evidence has been
discovered to prove this. We may, however, suggest that it is not, in
itself, an impossible or even an improbable linguistic division of Roman
Britain, even though the province did not contain any such racial
differences as those of German, Pole, Ruthene and Rouman which lend so
much interest to Austrian towns like Czernowitz.

[Footnote 1: _Proc. Soc. Antiq. London_, xxiii. 108; _Eph._ ix. 1290.]

[Illustration: FIG. 6. FRAGMENT OF INSCRIBED TILE FROM PLAXTOL AND
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE INSCRIPTIO