ABSTRACT
If there was indeed a revolt in Britain in 409 then it is very likely that only a comparatively small number of people actually left, since most army units had already gone. The departing handful of administrators and civil servants left behind them a densely settled landscape which supported sophisticated political, social, and economic structures and a high level of material prosperity based upon a market economy, although this last was by now ravaged by inflation and a debased coinage which in any case was about to disappear. Such a revolt implies leaders, and it is very likely that they emerged from the Romano-British aristocracy. The Celtic substratum of Roman Britain must have quickly reasserted itself to fill the power vacuum, since the veneer of Romanization was very thin. It is likely that Latin was quite widely spoken in the towns, which were very much Roman creations, and there is much evidence from graffiti on tiles, pottery, wall plaster and the like of a knowledge of both written and spoken Latin among the working population, although it was the Vulgar Latin of the western Empire rather than the formal, classical language of Caesar and Cicero. In the country its use was probably confined to those country gentry with a taste for Virgil. Celtic, however, was spoken everywhere. We may find some supporting evidence for this in the nature of the surviving placenames from Roman Britain. At least 350 names, whether of natural features such as rivers, or man-made ones like forts and towns, are known, but fewer than 25 are in fact Latin, the rest being British in origin, although taken over by the Roman authorities and dressed up to look like Latin, together with a handful which may belong to an older, pre-Celtic, linguistic stratum, including the root which lies behind the name of London.
