nclosure
about three-quarters of an acre in extent, containing round and square
huts or rooms, with walls of roughly coursed masonry and roofs of tile.
Scattered up and down in it lay hundreds of fragments of Samian and
other Roman or Romano-British pottery and a far smaller quantity of
ruder pieces, a few bits of Roman glass, some Roman coins of the period
A.D. 250-350, various iron nails and hooks, querns, bones, and so
forth.[1] The place lies on the extreme edge of the British province
and on an island where no proper Roman occupation can be detected, while
its ground-plan shows little sign of a Roman influence. Yet the smaller
objects and perhaps also the squareness of one or two rooms show that
even here, in the later days of the Empire, the products of Roman
civilization and the external fabric of Roman provincial life were
present and almost predominant.

[Footnote 1: E. Neil Baynes, _Arch. Cambrensis_, 1908, pp. 183-210.]

[Illustration: FIG. 12. NATIVE VILLAGE AT DIN LLIGWY, ANGLESEA.]

[Illustration: FIG. 13. LATE CELTIC METAL WORK, NOW IN THE BRITISH
MUSEUM (1/3).

(_Boss of shield, of perhaps first century B.C., found in the Thames at
Wandsworth, a little before 1850._)]

CHAPTER V

ROMANIZATION IN ART

Art shows a rather different picture. Here we reach definite survivals
of Celtic traditions. There flourished in Britain before the Claudian
conquest a vigorous native art, chiefly working in metal and enamel, and
characterized by its love for spiral devices and its fantastic use of
animal forms. This art--La Tene or Late Celtic or whatever it be
styled--was common to all the Celtic lands of Europe just before the
Christian era, but its vestiges are particularly clear in Britain. When
the Romans spread their dominion over the island, it almost wholly
vanished. For that we are not to blame any evil influence of this
particular Empire. All native arts, however beautiful, tend to disappear
before the more even technique and the neater finish of town
manufactures. The process is merely part of the honour which a coherent
civilization enjoys in the eyes of country folk. Disraeli somewhere
describes a Syrian lady preferring the French polish of a western boot
to the jewels of an eastern slipper. With a similar preference the
British Celt abandoned his national art and adopted the Roman provincial
fashion.

He did not abandon it entirely. Little local manufactures of pottery or
fibulae testify to