One other relic of the Roman dominion besides the great causeway survives in Churnside at the present day. High up the valley, on a low slope which overhangs the ruins of Churney Abbey, a ploughman happened one autumn morning some forty years since to drive his coulter somewhat deeper than usual into the soil and blunted its edge against a hard object in the ground beneath. In a spirit of pure opposition to obstacles he drove the point of his plough once more against the stone, as he supposed it to be, and found that he could neither root it up nor circumvent it by a side twist. Scraping away the earth he came to his astonishment upon a regular cemented floor, made up of little bits of stone fastened together in a pretty pattern by concrete. His first impulse was to cover up the uncanny thing at once and say nothing about it to anybody; for fairy superstitions were not yet quite dead in Churnside, and the country people even then attributed all objects found under ground to the agency of the elves, and considered that the less said about them the better. The good folks are a jealous little people, who don’t care to have their secrets discovered by prying mortals, and actually to see one is certain death in the remote corners of the West country even at our own day. On second thoughts, however, the ploughman told the farmer of his find, and the farmer in turn told the rector and the squire. When our Peddington Society came to clear away the rubbish which covered it, they lighted upon a well-preserved tesselated pavement and other relics of a Roman villa, whose style showed it to date from the middle of the third century. It is one of the finest specimens in the south or west of England, where such remains are far rarer than in the great northern corn-lands which surround the military stations along the wall and the provincial capital of York.
This luxurious villa betokens a marvellous change in the life and industry of Churnside after the Roman conquest. For the Roman occupation of Britain altered greatly in its later days. At first, while Aulus Plautius and Ostorius Scapula were engaged in overrunning the island, it was a good deal like our own rough military occupation of South-Eastern Afghanistan at the present moment; but, after the national uprising under Boudicea, and Agricola’s subsequent consolidation and organisation of the new provinces, Britain grew more into the condition of an Indian kingdom under direct English government. The native chief of the Katuriges was permitted to retain his position as a Roman vassal, and even the petty headman of the Churn valley was recognised to some extent by the Roman officials. The chief village of the tribe was made the site of a Roman military town, and a principal posting station on the Portway Street. It appears in the itineraries as Caturidunum; but the Celtic name was probably Caer Catur, and the later Anglo-Saxon title was certainly Caturceaster, a form still preserved in the modern county-town of Carchester. For it is a significant fact that most of these old British villages and Roman strongholds remain even to this day the administrative capitals of English shires; and that, in spite of the supposed “extermination” of the Welsh population by the Jute, the Englishman, and the Saxon, we find York, Lincoln, London, Manchester, Rochester, Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Exeter, and all the other chesters keeping up their importance through all the vicissitudes of fifteen hundred years. The Teutonic pirates, as we know so well, massacred every living soul within them; yet oddly enough in every case they made a correct guess at their Roman names notwithstanding, and continued to call them by those names ever afterwards.
King’s Peddington itself bore no special Latin title of its own; it is only entered in the Roman route-books as ad Cernuam or ad Decimum — the Station “at the Churn” or “at the tenth milestone” from Carchester. But it must necessarily have continued still the metropolis and commercial centre of the Churnside valley. Its natural position on the sea at the mouth of the river would by itself have given the site so much local importance; while the fact that the great Roman highway ran through its midst further marked it out, of course, as the place where the taxes of the valley were gathered in kind, to be transmitted viâ Carchester and Portsmouth to Gaul and Italy. These taxes appear to have been collected almost entirely in the shape of corn; for the Churnside valley was now tilled throughout, from the downs to the sea, and even the lower slopes of the upland were covered in part with patches of bearded wheat. All Britain, in fact, had become a great grain-growing and grain-exporting country, a supplementary feeder for Rome herself and for the crowded cities of southern Gaul. Her corn went to swell the stock received from the Nile and the Euxine, and she herself stood to Italy in somewhat the same economical relation as Egypt, Canada, and the Western States now stand to modern England. Only at Rome the reciprocity was really “all on one side.” In the vast ledger of the empire, Britain was entered solely on the debtor account. “Recruits, corn, tribute, slaves, mortgages”: these were the heads of the receipts from the British provinces; but the return items consisted only of prefects, legionaries, and a few trifling commercial articles of southern manufacture. We ourselves drain India heavily, but we pay her back something at least in European goods; the Romans drained Britain with tenfold rigour, and gave her back almost nothing, except a strong Government maintained by pitiless exactions.
At first it does not seem probable that the Celtic peasants of Churnside were actually deprived of their lands, which they held as the Celts of Ireland and Scotland held them long ages afterward, by tribal not by personal tenure. The head-man of the Churn valley villagers was entrusted with the task of collecting the revenue and handing it over to the Imperial officials at Carchester. He was responsible for so much corn to the authorities, and he distributed the incidence of the impost upon the villagers according to his own discretion. But in time the Roman legal system began to tell sadly against the native cultivators, as civilised legal systems always tell against barbaric or semi-barbaric tribes, upon which they are imposed from above. Little by little the Celts got into debt with Roman usurers, mortgaged their lands to cancel the debt, and finally lost them through inability to pay. So, as time went on, the position of the Churnside people became more and more degraded. At last, the whole valley fell into the hands of a single successful money-lender, a Roman adventurer, perhaps, from Bath or Colchester; and the Celtic cultivators sank into the position of serfs, as wretched as the Connemara peasants [before the Land Bills]. They tilled the soil for their Italian master, and shared their miserable cabins, which clustered round the villa on the hill-side, with the pigs and cattle, their fellow-slaves.
Nevertheless, wealth had necessarily grown with the spread of cultivation, the opening of roads, the digging of mines, and the rise of an industrial class in considerable towns like Lincoln, York, and London. Much of it was carried away to Rome, but some little portion at least was left in the tills of the merchants and usurers of the large towns. This remaining fraction was all concentrated, however, in the hands of a very small class. The landowner, whose villa occupied the brow of the hill at Churney Abbey, was obviously a wealthy man, even when judged by the standard of modern England. He planted his home on the sunniest slope of the valley, near the very spot afterwards chosen by those Cistercian monks who had always so keen an eye for a good building site, and he decorated it like the home of a Roman magnate at Tibur or Baiæ. His mosaic floors, his porphyry columns, his marble baths and fountains, his well-planned hypocaust, his frescoed walls, all indicate his wealth and taste, and have all left some relic of their former existence which can at once be recognised by the antiquarian eye. From his pillared portico he could look down over the whole cultivated valley, every acre of which was his own property and tilled by his own British serfs; and at the end of the vista he could catch a glimpse of the Channel, where the station at King’s Peddington put him in direct communication with the Portway Street and the rest of the Roman world at Carchester. One of the Peddington archæologists even fancies that he can detect across Champernhay farm some traces of the vicinal way, which led from the villa to the main road at the tenth milestone; but this is probably a piece of over-zealous historical and local enthusiasm. To the last, however, the Roman held himself apart from the native Celt, exactly as the Englishman holds himself apart from the native Hindoo. He added no new element to the population. There was no connubium even between them; and if a few half-castes grew up in the towns, their place was with the provincials, not with the Romans. The people remained as before, a mixed race of Celts and Euskarians, speaking the Celtic dialects, and preserving in many cases the Euskarian features. They never even learned, [at least out here in the south-west of Britain], as in Gaul, to use familiarly the Latin tongue. When the Romans left they were still speaking unmixed Welsh. To this day one may pick out Celtic words in the common speech of the Churnside people; but the name of Portway Street and the word castle applied to the hill-forts are almost the only Latin forms which have filtered through uninterruptedly from Roman times into the modern dialect of King’s Peddington.