Roman Britain in 1914

by F. Haverfield

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Incidentally, he offers a new theory of the two chapters in the Notitia Dignitatum which describe the forces commanded by the Comes Litoris Saxonici and the Dux Britanniarum (Occ. 28 and 40). It is agreed that these chapters do not exhibit the garrison of Britain at the moment when the Notitia was substantially completed, about A.D. 425, for the good reason that there was then no garrison left in the island; they exhibit some garrison which had then ceased to exist, and which is mentioned, apparently, to disguise the loss of the province. The question is, to what date do they refer? Mommsen long ago pointed out that the regiments enumerated in one part of them (the 'per lineam valli' section) are very much the same as existed in the third century. Seeck added the suggestion that these regiments remained in garrison till 383, when Maximus marched them off to the continent. According to him, the garrison of the Wall through the first eighty years of the fourth century was much the same as it had been in the third century, with certain changes and additions. Mr. Craster holds a different view. He thinks that most of the troops named in these chapters were due to Stilicho's reorganization in 395-9, but that one section, headed 'per lineam valli', records troops who had been in Britain in the third century and had been destroyed before 369. I cannot feel that he has proved his case. One would have thought that, when the compiler of the Notitia in 425 wanted to fill the gap left by the loss of the Wall, he would have gone back to the last garrison of the Wall, that is, on Mr. Craster's view, the garrison of 369-83, not to arrangements which had vanished some years earlier. But the problems of this obscure period are not to be solved without many attacks. We must be glad that Mr. Craster has delivered a serious attack; even if he has not succeeded, his scholarly discussion may make things easier for the next assailants.

(3) The Antiquary for 1914 contains an attempt by Mr. W. J. Kaye to catalogue all the examples of triple vases of Roman date found in Britain. It also prints a note by myself (p. 439) on the topography of the campaign of Suetonius against Boudicca, which argues that the defeat of the British warrior queen occurred somewhere on Watling Street between Chester (or Wroxeter) and London.

Fig. 18. Tile Graves in the Infirmary Field, Chester
Fig. 18. Tile Graves in the Infirmary Field, Chester

(4) In the Sitzungsberichte der kgl. preuss. Akademie (1914, p. 635), prof. Kuno Meyer, late of Liverpool, argues that the Celtic name of St. Patrick, commonly spelt Sucat and explained as akin to Celtic words meaning 'brave in war' (stem su-, 'good'), ought to be really spelt Succet and connected with Gaulish names like Succius and Sucelus. This, he thinks, destroys the last remnant of a reason for Zimmer's idea that Patrick was the same as Palladius.

2. Special Sites or Districts

Berks

(5) Some notes of traces, near Kintbury west of Speen (Spinae), of the Roman road from Silchester to Bath are given by Mr. O. G. S. Crawford in the Berks, Bucks, and Oxon Archaeological Journal for Oct. 1914 (xx. 96).

Cheshire