C. 3.—­The many relics of the Roman occupation to be seen in the Museum at the Guildhall bear further testimony to the commercial importance of the City in those early days, an importance primarily due, as we have already seen, to the natural facilities for crossing the Thames at London Bridge.[215] The greatness of Roman London seems, however, to have been purely commercial.  We do not even know that it was the seat of government for its own division of Britain.  It was not a Colony, nor (in spite of the exceptional strength of the site, surrounded, as it was, by natural moats)[216] does it ever appear as of military importance till the campaign of Theodosius at the very end of the chapter.[217] In the ‘Notitia’ it figures as the head-quarters of the Imperial Treasury, and about the same date we learn that the name Augusta had been bestowed upon the town, as on Caerleon and on so many others throughout the Empire, though the older “London” still remained unforgotten.[218]

C. 4.—­But, so far as Britain had a recognized capital at all, York and not London best deserved that name.  For here was the chief military nerve-centre of the land, the head-quarters of the Army, where the Commander-in-Chief found himself in ready touch with the thick array of garrisons holding every strategic point along the various routes by which any invader who succeeded in forcing the Wall would penetrate into the land.  At York, accordingly, the Emperors who visited Britain mostly held their court; beginning with Hadrian, who here established the Sixth Legion which he had brought over with him, possibly incorporating with it the remains of the Ninth, traces of which are here found.  And here it remained permanently quartered to the very end of the Roman occupation, as abundant inscriptions, etc. testify.  One of these, found in the excavations for the railway station, is a brass tablet with a dedication (in Greek) to The Gods of the Head Praetorium [[Greek:  theois tois tou haegemonikou praitoriou]], bearing witness to the essential militarism of the city.

C. 5.—­A Praetorium, moreover, was not merely a military centre.  It was also, as at Jerusalem, a Judgment Hall; and here, probably, the Juridicus Britanniae[219] exercised his functions, which would seem to have been something resembling those of a Lord Chief Justice.  Precedents laid down by his Court are quoted as still in force even by the Codex of Justinian (555).  One of these incidentally lets us know that the Romans kept up not only a British Army, but a British Fleet in being.[220] The latter, probably, as well as the former, had its head-quarters at York, where the Ouse of old furnished a far more available waterway than now.  Even so late as 1066 the great fleet of Harold Hardrada could anchor only a few miles off, at Riccall:  and there is good evidence that in the Roman day the river formed an extensive “broad” under the walls of York itself.  As at Portsmouth and Plymouth to-day, the presence of officers and seamen of the Imperial Navy must have added to the military bustle in the streets of Eboracum; while tesselated pavements, unknown in the ruder fortresses of the Wall, testify to the softer side of social life in a garrison town.