As in Gaul a century earlier, so in Britain from the mid-first century AD onwards, expression of Celtic self-awareness was curbed, and some Gauls and Britons would no doubt have wished to be seen as much abreast of new life styles from the southerly world as wedded to old Celtic ways. Their dress and eating habits saw some changes, with better class utensils and crockery (platters, from which few Britons had previously taken their food). But even then there were undercurrents of resistance to change: at Colchester, for instance, at the Sheepen site the old huts seem to have been left standing through the 40s and 60s and occupied by natives (probably as a source of labour for the citizens of the nearby Roman colonia (started in AD 49). But though they increasingly used good crockery and had some table - and window-glass (Hawkes and Hull 1947: passim), the food-refuse bones are mostly cattle, and old butchering habits show that the British had retained their old eating ways (H. M. Jope 1984). Here we see the fluctuations of personal taste in visual art (mainly ceramic) in relation to lifestyle operating in day-to-day life.
In both Gaul and Britain ‘Celticity’ had a subtle persuasive influence on Roman provincial artistic work (as indeed it must have done in more easterly Celtic provinces). We see this in the Bath gorgon (Cunliffe and Davenport 1985; Toynbee 1962: 161-4; 1964: 130-3), in capitals at Cirencester (Toynbee 1962: 165, pi. 97-100) or among the rural temples of Gaul and Britain. A stone head from Corbridge in Northumberland, second-third century AD (Figure 21.12; Toynbee 1962: 146, pi. 49) shows well how in Roman Britain people who esteemed themselves ‘Celtic’ could cherish their identity visually, for nothing could have been less acceptable to real Roman visual taste than this hyper-fastidious face, more subtly sensitive than anything purely Roman (cf. the Wandsworth ‘mask’ shield. Figure 21.2). The strength of surviving feeling for old Celtic ways is summed up in the head of an antlered god with torques hanging from its antlers, named Cernunnos, on an altar found beneath Notre Dame in Paris (Brogan 1955: 173, pi. 47a). And not for nothing did the outlaws in Gaul in the 280s band together, choosing a Celtic title Bagaudae, ‘the valiant’.
In rural Roman Britain many Britons continued to live in round-houses, as Einzelhofe, or grouped in more communal settlements or hill-forts, and occasional pieces of artwork tell us something about the status and lifestyle of inhabitants. At Coygan on the south-west Welsh coast (where we have already looked at earlier inhabitants, see p. 393) a round-house on a defended promontory (first used in the third-second century BC, see above p. 393) yielded from second-third century AD occupation debris a simple iron dagger with ball hand-grip (Wainwright 1967) and a small twisted double-snake bead of bronze, apparently from a collar of Lambay type (Jope and Jacobsthal in press: pis 259-61; cf. Beswick et al. 1990), showing such ‘lairds’ at home with their status markers in immediate context. And the inhabitants of a small rural establishment at Lower Slaughter in fourth-century Gloucestershire did at least have table - and window-glass, and two fine little statuettes hidden away in a nook with three little altars to show their rustic taste; and votive tablets were in a well filling (O’Neil 1961; note that the famed earliest of the ogams (Chapter 37) came from a well of this age at Silchester).
In Caledonia, for instance, romanization did not penetrate very deeply into the ways of a native society, which might retain old individual ways. Terrets, the rein-guide rings on paired-draught vehicles, could illustrate this, for during the second-third centuries AD a group of distinctive designs (e. g. ‘Donside’; Simpson 1943: 78-9; Jope and Jacobsthal in press: pi. 291) have a distribution extending northwards far beyond any other items of evidence for wheeled vehicle use at this time (linchpins, bridle-bits, etc.). There terrets must therefore presumably have been non-functional (and indeed some have little brazed-on loops for hanging), but emblematic of some legal rights, e. g. territorial, hunting or judicial (Jope and Jacobsthal m press: pi. 291 notes), giving at last a window on the ways of old Celtic administration in a pre-literate society.
The art of writing was itself a mark of social distinction (Prosdocimi and Kruta, m Moscati et al. 1991: 51-9, 491-8) in Celtic Europe, to be found from the third century BC onwards. In Britain there was little evidence of it before romanization, for coins hardly counted in this context.
World History
