Britain is now the main source of new Latin. Among British finds there are 130 curse tablets from the Sacred Spring at Bath, of roughly the second to fourth centuries A.D., some of them reasonably preserved, others fragmentary. These have recently been published by R.S.O. Tomlin, in a wide-ranging edition. An examination of Tomlin's elegant drawings of the tablets will make obvious to anyone the difficulty of reading the script, and Tomlin has done a remarkable job in elucidating the texts. He has also provided an extensive introduction, with a classification of formulae and linguistic phenomena, and a detailed commentary. The language of the tablets is of some interest. Various new usages make their appearance, and it is not fanciful to find the odd phenomenon which may have been characteristic particularly of British Latin. Here I offer a few new readings, some new interpretations, and a more extensive discussion of the Latinity than that attempted by Tomlin.

As a schoolboy in the early 1960s the writer discovered a series of Iron Age and Roman salt-production sites along the shoreline of Chichester and Portsmouth Harbours (FIG. 1). These areas were visited intermittently over the next ten years and many of the observations made at that time were published in 1975. That study described the topographical setting of these sites and the character and chronology of the surface finds. It also included some discussion of the economic context of salt-making and its place in the settlement pattern.

The Roman fort of Carlisle was first discovered by the late Dorothy Charlesworth in 1973 at Annetwell Street. Excavation by her and after 1980 by the Carlisle Archaeological Unit located the southern defences of the primary fort and identified a sequence of Roman forts extending from AD. 72/3 down to the fourth century. In 1981–2 excavation at Castle Street produced a sequence of timber phases closely matching the fort stratigraphy, with military association in the finds assemblages, but lying outside the fort defences. The early phases were arguably part of a defended annexe or within a military vicus, though proof was lacking.

The absence of immediately post-Roman evidence from fourth-century Roman military sites in western and northern Britain, forming a pattern of widespread disuse in the fifth and sixth centuries, has been strongly established. South of the Mersey the post-Roman finds from Segontium are not certainly of pre-eighth-century date, and the apparent evidence at Brecon Gaer has now been discounted by J.L. Davies. So – unless we accept a post-Roman dating for the penannular brooch from Castell Collen – only Pen Llystyn, where there is a single, possibly fourth-century, potsherd, has produced what might be considered convincing evidence of immediately post-Roman occupation at a fourth-century fort site. At Pen Llystyn the evidence, albeit enigmatic, seems to indicate fifth- or sixth-century reuse (perhaps even by the Irish notable named on a nearby Class-I inscribed stone) of the disused Roman fort for the site of a palisaded enclosure. It must, however, be doubted whether the site was in use in the fourth century. In the North, sites with fifth- and sixth-century evidence are only a little more plentiful – Manchester, Piercebridge, and Ribchester have possible, or probable, evidence of such use.

The contrasting fortunes of Christianity in Britain and on the Continent in the late fourth and fifth centuries are one of the truisms of history. Why did Roman Britain fail to follow the example of other provinces in the West and preserve a powerful and episcopally-led Christian Church, so that despite the destruction wrought by the barbarian invasions the continuity between Roman province and Germanic kingdom could be maintained? Why, alone among the western provinces, did Catholic Christianity have to be replanted in an almost wholly pagan environment whence all records of previous Christianisation appear to have perished?

There has been a considerable amount of discussion of the apparent lack in London of later Roman evidence of all kinds compared with earlier Roman evidence, and there is general agreement that this probably represents a substantial decline in the urban population. If this interpretation is true, it has fundamental implications for the understanding of the economic and political status of the Roman city and of all structures, public, domestic, commercial, and industrial; and it would not be an exaggeration to say that this is one of the most important research topics associated with the archaeology of Londinium.

There is only one piece of explicit evidence that the Twentieth Legion was ever based at Wroxeter (Viroconium), a tombstone discovered in 1752, since published as RIB 293. That the evidence is explicit, however, has been questioned.

The Chesters villa is situated midway between Chepstow and Lydney on the right bank of the Severn Estuary (FIG. 1). The residential quarters (centred on ST 59709870) lie on the shoulder of the Kidderminster Terrace (sands, gravels), about 250 m from the modern shore between the 11 and 16 m contours, and face south across the estuary. Between 1932 and 1935 C. Scott Garrett carried out a series of excavations, mostly in the field known as Lower Chesters south of the railway line. These revealed, on the eastern side, a residential range with a bath-block at its southern end. From this a courtyard wall was defined on three sides, with traces of structures along the south, and a subdivided, rectangular building at the northern end of the western wall. No evidence was found of a northern range, although rubble spreads on the surface of the field, and now aerial photography, make it clear that such a range existed. Indeed, its size, coupled with the incidence of mosaic tesserae in the ploughsoil, suggest that it was the most elaborate quarter of the villa. The cropmark evidence for this range is plotted on FIG. 1. Apart from one reference to iron slag as a ‘material which can be found almost anywhere on the site', the excavations provided no evidence of the role that iron-making might have played in the economy of the villa.