of the place-name may be at
least as old. No other difficulty seems to hinder the derivation of
'Kent' from the form 'Cantium', and the whole argument based on the name
thus collapses. It is impossible here to go through the whole list of
cases which have been supposed to be parallel in their origin to 'Kent',
nor should I, with a scanty knowledge of the subject, be justified in
such an attempt. I have selected this particular example because it has
been emphasized by a recent writer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, p. 102. I am indebted
to Mr. W.H. Stevenson for help in relation to these philological
points.]

CHAPTER IV

ROMANIZATION IN MATERIAL CIVILIZATION

From language we pass to material civilization. Here is a far wider
field of evidence, provided by buildings, private or public, their
equipment and furniture, and the arts and small artistic or decorative
objects. On the whole this evidence is clear and consistent. The
material civilization of the province, the external fabric of its life,
was Roman, in Britain as elsewhere in the west. Native elements
succumbed almost wholesale to the conquering foreign influence. In
regard to public buildings this is natural enough. Before the Claudian
conquest the Britons can hardly have possessed large structures in
stone, and the provision of them necessarily came in with the Romans.
The _fora_, basilicas, and public baths, such as have been discovered at
Silchester, Caerwent and elsewhere, follow Roman models and resemble
similar buildings in other provinces. The temples show something more of
a local pattern (Fig. 7), which occurs also in northern Gaul and on the
Rhine, but this pattern seems merely a variation of a classical type.[1]
The characteristics of the private houses are more complicated. Their
ground-plans show us types which, like the temples just mentioned, recur
in northern Gaul as well as Britain, but which differ even more than the
temples from the similar buildings in Italy, or indeed in the
Mediterranean provinces of the Empire. The houses of Italy and of the
south generally were constructed to look inwards upon open _impluvia_,
colonnaded courts and garden plots, and, as befitted a hot climate, they
had few outer windows. Moreover, they could be easily built side by side
so as to form, as at Pompeii, the continuous streets of a town. The
houses of Britain and northern Gaul looked outwards on to the
surrounding country.