icipal
_colonia_ or _municipium_. So far from wearing a native aspect, this
cantonal system merely became one of the influences which aided the
Romanization of the country. It did not, indeed, involve, like the
municipal system, the substitution of an Italian for a native
institution. Instead, it permitted the complete remodelling of the
native institution by the interpenetration of Italian influences.

We can discern the cantonal system at several points in Britain. But the
British cantons were smaller and less wealthy than those of Gaul, and
therefore they have not left their mark, either in monuments or in
nomenclature, so clearly as we might desire. Many inscriptions record
the working of the system in Gaul. Many modern towns--Paris, Reims,
Chartres, and thirty or forty others--derive their present names from
those of the ancient cantons, and not from those of the ancient towns.
In Britain we find only one such inscription (Fig. 15),[1] only one town
called in antiquity by a tribal name--and that a doubtful
instance[2]--and no single case of a modern town-name which is derived
from the name of a tribe.[3] We have, however, some curious evidence
from another source. There is a late and obscure _Geography of the Roman
Empire_ which was probably written at Ravenna somewhere about A.D. 700,
and which, as its author's name is lost, is generally quoted as the work
of 'Ravennas'. It consists for the most part of mere lists of names,
about which it adds very few details. But in the case of Britain it
notes the municipal rank of the various _coloniae_, and it further
appends tribal names to nine or ten town-names, which are thus
distinguished from all other British place-names. For example, we have
Venta Belgarum (Winchester), not Venta simply; Corinium Dobunorum
(Cirencester), not Corinium simply. The towns thus specially marked out
are just those towns which are also declared by their actual remains to
have been the chief country towns of Roman Britain. This coincidence can
hardly be an accident. We may infer that the towns to which the Ravennas
appends tribal names were the cantonal capitals of the districts of
Roman Britain, and that a list of them, perhaps mutilated and imperfect,
has been preserved by some chance in this late writer. In other words,
the larger part of Roman Britain was divided up into districts
corresponding to the territories of the Celtic tribes; each had its
capital, and presumably its magistrates a