[The Romanization of Roman Britain by F. Haverfield]@TWC D-Link book
The Romanization of Roman Britain

CHAPTER V
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Examples of each have been excavated in the south-west of England, hardly thirty miles apart.
The Celtic village is close to Glastonbury in Somerset.

Of itself it is a small, poor place--just a group of pile dwellings rising out of a marsh, or (as it may then have been) a lake, and dating from the two centuries immediately preceding the Christian era.[1] Yet, poor as it was, its art is distinct.

There one recognizes all that general delight in decoration and that genuine artistic instinct which mark Late Celtic work, while the technical details of the ornament, as, for example, the returning spiral, reveal their affinity with the same native fashion.

On the other hand, no trace of classical workmanship or design intrudes.
There has not been found anywhere in the village even a _fibula_ with a hinge instead of a spring, or of an Italian (as opposed to a Late Celtic) pattern.

Turn now to the Romano-British villages excavated by General Pitt-Rivers at Woodcuts and Rotherley and Woodyates, eleven miles south-west of Salisbury, near the Roman road from Old Sarum (Sorbiodunum) to Dorchester in Dorset.[2] Here you may search in vain for vestiges of the native art or of that delight in artistic ornament which characterizes it.


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