ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that individual Christians, perhaps even small communities of Christians, were to be found in Britain as early as the second century after Christ, though their proportion to the whole population of the province would seem to have been very small. The few churches whose ruins have survived from Roman Britain are all small and plain. If the Christians of Calleva found the diminutive church lately discovered there sufficient for their needs, they must have been but a few hundreds in a population that would seem to have numbered perhaps 2,000 souls. It may perhaps be suggested that Christianity, as elsewhere in the empire, was strongest in the great towns during the fourth century. The existence of a vigorous British Christendom in the fourth century is sufficiently proved by literary evidence which it would be absurd to attempt to minimise.
