ABSTRACT
The Roman Empire was originally a federated assembly of farmers’ small-holdings, and it was as a levy of property-conscious, neighbour-suspicious, stranger-envious farmers that Rome first went to war – and first broke upon the notice of history. Since a Roman camp was laid out in exactly the same way as a ‘collective farm’, the ‘Cripplegate Fort’ was similarly laid out. An aerial view of the vanished Roman military town of Caistor, in Norfolk, shews ideally how a Roman military establishment was laid out. But the probability is that London, in common with the other European cities of the Empire, was walled in that disastrous third century when almost every Roman city seemed to its anxious inhabitants to be the target of barbarian raiders.
