y
insignificant. Over the debris of Numantine liberty a little Roman
town grew up. But it is hardly mentioned save in one or two
road-books. Yet it enjoyed some form of municipal status and its
streets and houses show to the excavator traces of Roman
town-planning. The streets ran parallel or at right angles to one
another; the house-blocks measured some 50 yds. square.[100]

[100] Schulten, _Abhandlungen der k. Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften zu Goettingen, phil.-hist. Kl._, viii. (1905), p.
61, plan 2; the evidence seems adequate though not wholly
decisive. The Roman town Emporiae, now Ampurias, in the extreme
north-east of Spain, seems to have had a rectangular street-plan,
though its Greek predecessor was irregular, _Institut d'estudis
catalans, anuari 1908_, p. 185.

A third example may be drawn from our own country. Lincoln, the Roman
Lindum, was established as a 'colonia' about A.D. 75, and the lines of
its original area, its 'Altstadt'--for it was perhaps enlarged in
Roman times,--can still be traced 'Above Hill' round the Castle and
Cathedral (fig. 26). It formed a rectangle just over 41 acres in
extent (400 x 500 yds.). Four gates, one of which still keeps its
Roman arch, gave access to the two main streets which divided the town
into four symmetrical quarters and crossed at right angles in the
centre. Along one of these streets, which agrees, if only roughly,
with the modern Bailgate, ran a stately colonnade (fig. 27), though
whether this belonged to some special building or adorned the whole
extent of street is not quite certain. Beneath the same street ran, as
at Timgad and Laibach and elsewhere, the town sewer (fig. 28). Of the
other main street and of side streets nothing is known, but we can
hardly doubt that they carried out the chess-board pattern.[101]

[101] _Archaeologia_, liii. 236 and lvi. 371. The plan given by
Mr. Fox in liii. 236 represents his own theory, which may be open
to doubt.

Probably the other four municipalities in Britain were planned
similarly, though the evidence is too slender to prove it. At
Verulamium (for example) near St. Albans, a local archaeologist long
ago claimed to detect a scheme of symmetrical house-blocks, resembling
squares very slightly askew. Subsequent inquiry has shown that this
scheme was merely or mostly imagination.[102]

[102] J.W. Grover, _Brit. Archaeol. Assoc. Journal_, xxvi.
(1870), p. 45, plate 1. T