is
well known.]

[Footnote 5: See my papers in _Archaeologia Aeliana_, xxv. (1904) 142-7,
and _Proceedings of Soc. of Antiq. of Scotland_, xxxviii. 454.]

[Footnote 6: The town wall of Isurium, partly visible to-day in Mr. A.S.
Lawson's garden, is constructed in a fashion which suggests rather the
second century than the later date when most of the town walls in
Britain and Gaul were probably built, the end of the third or even the
fourth century. Thus, its stones show the 'diamond broaching' which
occurs on the Vallum of Pius, and which must therefore have been in use
during the second century.]

Peace hardly set in till the opening of the third century. It was then,
I think, that country-houses and farms first became common in all parts
of the civilized area. The statistics of datable objects discovered in
these buildings seem conclusive on this point. Except in Kent and the
south-eastern region generally, not only coins, but also pottery of the
first century are infrequent, and many sites have yielded nothing
earlier than about A.D. 250. Despite the ill name that attaches to the
third and fourth centuries, they were perhaps for Britain, as for parts
of Gaul,[1] a period of progressive prosperity. Certainly, the number of
British country-houses and farms inhabited during the years A.D. 280-350
must have been very large. Prosperity culminated, perhaps, in the
Constantinian Age. Then, as Eumenius tells us, skilled artisans abounded
in Britain far more than in Gaul, and were fetched from the island to
build public and private edifices as far south as Autun.[2] Then also,
and, indeed, as late as 360, British corn was largely exported to the
Rhine Valley,[3] and British cloth earned a notice in the eastern Edict
of Diocletian.[4] The province at that time was a prosperous and
civilized region, where Latin speech and culture might be expected to
prevail widely.

[Footnote 1: Mommsen, _Roem. Gesch._, v. 97, 106, and Ausonius,
_passim_.]

[Footnote 2: Eumenius, _Paneg. Constantio Caesari_, 21 _civitas Aeduorum
... plurimos quibus illae provinciae_ (Britain) _redundabant accepit
artifices, et nunc exstructione veterum domorum et refectione operum
publicorum et templorum instauratione consurgit_.]

[Footnote 3: Ammianus, xviii. 2,3, _annona a Brittaniis sueta
transferri_; Zosimus, iii. 5.]

[Footnote 4: Edict. Diocl. xix. 36. Compare Eumenius, _Paneg.
Constantino Aug.,_ 9 _pecorum innumerabilis multitudo ... onusta
ve