these are beautifully
modelled and finished, and not unseldom glazed in various ways. But
there is no evidence that the delicate "Samian" ware[235] was ever
manufactured in Britain, though every house of any pretensions
possessed a certain store of it. The indigenous art of
basket-making[236] also continued as a speciality of Britain under the
Romans, and the indigenous mining for tin, lead, iron, and copper was
developed by them on the largest scale. In every district where these
metals are found, in Cornwall, in Somerset, in Wales, in Derbyshire,
and in Sussex, traces of Roman work are apparent, dating from the very
beginning of the occupation to the very end. The earliest known
Roman inscription found in Britain is one of A.D. 49 (the year before
Ostorius subdued the Iceni) on a pig of lead from the Mendips,[237]
and similar pigs bearing the Labarum, _i.e._ not earlier than
Constantine presumably, have been dredged up in the Thames below
London.[238] Inscriptions also survive to tell us of a few amongst
the many other trades which must have figured in Romano-British
life,--goldsmiths, silversmiths, iron-workers, stone-cutters,
sculptors, architects, eye-doctors, are all thus commemorated.[239]

C. 14.--But then, as always, the life of Britain was mainly rural. The
evidence for this unearthed in the Cam valley has already been spoken
of, and in every part of England the "villas" of the great Roman
landowners are constantly found. Hundreds have already been
discovered, and year by year the list is added to. One of the most
recent of the finds is that at Greenwich in 1901, and the best known,
perhaps, that at Brading in the Isle of Wight. Here, as elsewhere,
the tesselated pavements, the elaborate arrangements for warming (by
hypocausts conveying hot air to every room), the careful laying out of
the apartments, all testify to the luxury in which these old landlords
lived. For the "villa" was the Squire's Hall of the period, and was
provided, like the great country houses of to-day, with all the best
that contemporary life could give.[240] And, like these also, it was
the centre of a large circle of humbler dependencies wherein resided
the peasantry of the estate and the domestics of the mansion.[241] The
existence amongst these of huntsmen (as inscriptions tell) reminds
us that not only was the chase, then as now, popular amongst the
squirearchy, but that there was a far larger scope for its exercise.
Great forests st