The standard pattern of Gallic local magistracies, so familar to all students of the Roman west, is apparently very straightforward. The progression of the tribal decurion from quaestorship (dealing with finance) to aedileship (dealing with administration) to duumvirate (the chief magisterial office, dealing especially with justice) is repeated by modern authorities time and again more or less as an absolute fact of civitas-life. In such circumstances one would be perfectly justified in assuming that the existence of this system was supported by a strong body of indigenous evidence; however, any close examination soon reveals that the theory as postulated is not derived from information available from the Three Gauls. A careful reading of Jullian's influential account of the Gallo-Roman magistracies shows that the greater part of his examples were drawn, not from Gaul as a whole, but from the grossly atypical province of Narbonensis, with its mass of colonies. Moreover, when even Narbonese evidence was lacking, such emphasis on highly-Romanized administrative practices allowed him to introduce the results of the vast amount of work done on the coloniae and municipia of Italy and Spain. In short, as far as the civitates of the Three Gauls are concerned, the prevailing orthodoxy as to the local career-patterns supposedly followed by their ruling aristocracies is derived not from peregrine Gallic communities but from Roman and Latin settlements clustered around the western Mediterranean.

Since the publication of Professor Grimes's account of the excavations at Holt (Grimes, 1930), in which he includes a general survey of tile-production and a list of tile and pottery kilns, no detailed research on the tile industry has been carried out in Britain apart from work on patterned flue-tiles (e.g. Lowther, 1948). In Italy much more has been learnt about the organisation of the tile and brick industry from an examination of the many stamps from Rome, Ostia and elsewhere (Bloch, 1967; Helen, 1975; and various volumes of CIL) and further research is being undertaken by Dr Steinby of the Finnish Institute in Rome. In this country, however, no overall survey of the production and distribution of tiles has been undertaken and one is not aware that such research is currently in progress. For this reason it has been necessary to examine the evidence from the whole of Britain when trying to understand problems concerned with the tile industry in the Cirencester region.

The date of 441/2 for the decisive point in the series of events which constituted the adventus Saxonum has frequently been quoted as deriving from a contemporary source. As a matter of fact, however, it is a ghostdate, born in 1892. It originated in a marginale by Mommsen to a chronicle-fragment which is one of the continuations used to extend the Carolingian edition of Jerome. This fragment was edited and annotated by Mommsen before the modern editions of Jerome were available. The information required to correct Mommsen has, however, been readily accessible since 1923, and the manuscript basis of his text has been open to consultation in London for much longer. It is not my purpose here to wage any wars, even upon a long neglect of the primary source, but merely to set out some considerations of Form-kritik which are the historian's equivalent to the archaeologist's typological criteria.

The discovery of a large Roman camp at Durno, six miles NW of Inverurie, in Aberdeenshire, was made on 26 July 1975, in the course of a reconnaissance flight from Scone airfield to the Moray Firth. Only about half the perimeter, including two gates (each with a traverse) was visible at the time of discovery, but this was enough to show that the area exceeded 50 acres. Further observation from the air in 1976-77, and field-work, including the digging of a number of ditch-sections, have established the line of the ditch round the greater part of the perimeter, proving the area to be about 140 acres (57 ha.).