For the rest, the imported and there-fore superficial civilization was never more than skin-deep with the country since it did not include the broad masses of the people to whom it was alien, so it evaporated as soon as the importers left, which happened four hundred years after they came.

Those historians who base their obon the data derived from town life, that is, the life of the romanized upper layers of the British Celts, state that Romanization was completed and the Celts forgot they were Britons.

Romanization was nearly non-existent in Ireland and Scotland. In the countrythe old Celtic way of life was preserved, the Celts continued living in their old Celtic way, suffering from the invaders' exploitation, passing their native customs and traditions from generation to generation and speaking their Celtic dialects enriched by some of the Latin words like "castra" — military camp (found now in names like Lancaster, Winchester, Chichester, Cirencester, Leicester, Chester, etc.), "vallum"- wall (Hadrian's Wall, Anto-nine's Wall), "via strata" — street (Wailing street, Ermine street}. True, the wealthy British farmers had their lands tilled by slaves in the Roman fashion while the old Celtic social structure of the village coexisted with these imported arrangements.

The decay of Roman power in Britain became apparent already at the end of the 4th c.; the attacks of the wild Celtic tribes from behind the walls that had sealed off those dangerous areas, were no longer so efficiently and promptly repulsed in the latter part of the 5th c. as it used to have been the Romans' way; the usual grain-laden ships were no longer sent to the metropolis. Finally in 407 orders came for the legions to return. Evidently, the safety of Rome itself was in question: its rotten economy based on the sand of slavery, its greed-swollen conquest craze that lured the Romans on to bite off more than they could chew, its clay-legged military dictatorship aggravated by the bicker-ings of the would-be emperors who were constantly at each other's throat in their scrambling for power, made the great city an easy prey to any west-migrating barbaric tribes like the Germanic tribes of the period. As it is, there are supposi-tions to the effect that the British Roman ruler of the time, Constantine, was himself eager to try and get the crown for himself, using the legions at his disposal for the purpose. So the Romans left, and failed to return.