Doubtless in Roman times the governing forces of Britain attempted a similar system here.  But it does not seem ever to have taken root in the same way that it did beyond the Channel.  The absence of a municipal system in the fullest sense is one of the very few things which differentiates the Roman Britain from the rest of the Empire, others being a land frontier to the west, and the large survival of aboriginal dialects.

The Roman towns were not small, indeed Roman London was very large; they were not ill connected with highroads; they were certainly wealthy and full of commerce; but they gave their names to no districts, and their municipal institutions have left but very faint traces upon posterity.

The barbarian invasions fell severely upon the Roman cities of Britain, in some very rare cases they may have been actually destroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may be reasonably sure that municipal life continued without a break throughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; and when recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years, with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, we find thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the towns living the life of villages.

The proportion that were walled was much smaller than was the case upon the Continent, and even the most enduring emblem and the most tenacious survival of the Roman Imperial system—­namely, the Bishop seated in the chief municipality of his district—­was not universal to English life.

It is characteristic of Gregory the Great that he intended, or is believed to have intended, Britain, when he had recivilised it, to be set out upon a clear Latin model, with a Primate in the chief city and suffragans in every other.  But if he had such a plan (and it would have been a typically Latin plan) he must have been thinking of a Britain very different from that which his envoys actually found.  When the work was accomplished the little market town of Canterbury was the seat of the Primate; the old traditions of York secured for it a second archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but small villages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were the sites of cathedrals.  Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was the episcopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their government of Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, or rather village, for something like half England.  In the names of its officers also and in the methods of their government the Anglo-Saxon town was agricultural.