when Britain thereafter almost disappeared from recorded history,
recent investigations are compelling us to realize more and more the
influence that contact with Merovingian Gaul had upon the com-
mercial, cultural and even administrative developments in at least
the south-eastern corner of Britain.

It is not, therefore, surprising that, in their schemes of conquest,
the Romans should cast their eyes past the Channel to the lowlands
beyond. In the event this gently undulating country, carrying few
hilly districts above six hundred feet, accessible in most of its parts,
fertile in its soil, presented no serious obstacle to the Roman armies
after the Claudian invasion of A.D. 43. So quickly was resistance
overborne and the work of pacification completed that the forts that
were presumably constructed here and there in the first stages of
conquest must have been abandoned at an early date, and they have
left only slight traces of their existence. So the lowland zone
became an area of essentially civil occupation, in which the processes
of romanization could exert their full influence.

The mountain chain from Cornwall to North Scotland presented
an entirely different problem, to which an entirely different answer
had to be given. Very probably Claudius, and certainly Agricola,
had thought that the subjugation of the whole of Britain was a quite
feasible project, and for a time it must have seemed that success did
not lie beyond their grasp. The Dumnonian peninsula of Devon
and Cornwall gave no trouble and, as we now know, the Romans
did not hesitate eventually to establish villa estates around the coast,
though they left the inhospitable hills and moorlands to the Celts.
And Wales had been brought firmly under control by the time
Agricola became governor in 77 and on the whole it remained
quiescent thereafter, so much so that the score or so forts, erected
to keep it under supervision, were apparently denuded of their
garrisons some time in the second century. Nor did the Pennine
Dales impede for long the northward thrust of Rome: once the hill-
fortresses of the native tribes had been overthrown, the surrounding
countryside could keep up no prolonged resistance. The advance
beyond the Cheviots, however, met with vacillating fortune. Agri-
cola in 83 marched into Perthshire, defeated the Caledonians at
Mons Graupius, and constructed garrison-forts at those strategic
points where the Grampian passes debouched upon the Scottish

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