In 1905 Francis Haverfield, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, read, before the British Academy his now-famous paper, ‘The Romanization of Roman Britain’ (later published in the second volume of the Academy's Proceedings and in book form: second, enlarged, edition 1912). It was an elegant distillation of Haverfield's painstaking researches into the minutiae of Romano-British archaeology, presented against the background of the wider Empire. His vision was clear ‘. . . Romano- British life was on a small scale. It was, I think, normal in quality and indeed not very dissimilar from that of many parts of Gaul. But it was in any case defective in quantity. We find towns in Britain, as elsewhere, and farms or country-houses. But the towns are small and somewhat few, and the country-houses indicate comfort more often than wealth . . , We have before us a civilisation which, like a man whose constitution is sound rather than strong, might perish quickly from a violent shock.