First, in respect of language. Even before the Claudian conquest of A.D.
43, British princes had begun to inscribe their coins with Latin words.
These legends are not merely blind and unintelligent copies, like the
imitations of Roman legends on the early English _sceattas_. The word
most often used, REX, is strange to the Roman coinage, and must have
been employed with a real sense of its meaning. After A.D. 43, Latin
advanced rapidly. No Celtic inscription occurs, I believe, on any
monument of the Roman period in Britain, neither cut on stone nor
scratched on tile or potsherd, and this fact is the more noteworthy
because, as I shall point out below, Celtic inscriptions are not at all
unknown in Gaul. On the other hand, Roman inscriptions occur freely in
Britain. They are less common than in many other provinces, and they
abound most in the military region. But they appear also in towns and
country-houses, and some of the instances are significant.

The town site that we can best examine for our present purpose is
Calleva or Silchester, ten miles south of Reading, which has been
completely excavated with care and thoroughness. Here a few fairly
complete inscriptions on stone have been discovered, and many fragments
of others, which prove that the public language of the town was
Latin.[1] The speech of ordinary conversation is equally well
attested by smaller inscribed objects, and the evidence is remarkable,
since it plainly refers to the lower class of Callevans. When a weary
brick-maker scrawls SATIS with his finger on a tile, or some prouder
spirit writes CLEMENTINVS FECIT TVBVL(_um_) (Clementinus made this
box-tile), when a bit of Samian is marked FVR--presumably as a warning
from the servants of one house to those of the next--or a rude brick
shows the word PVELLAM--probably part of an amatory sentence otherwise
lost--or another brick gives a Roman date, the 'sixth day before the