Note 2401 — THE CASSITERIDES, ICTIS, AND THE BRITISH TRADE IN TIN

Ib. What puzzles me is how Professor Haverfield reconciles his view that in the third century ‘Cornish tin began to take its place as an article of commerce in Roman Britain’ (Mélanges Boissier, 1903, p. 251) with his own suggestion (ib., p. 250) that ‘either the tin ores had never been so rich as fancy painted, or the accessible deposits had been worked out [two centuries earlier], or ... Spanish competition had ousted British tin’. Evidently the accessible deposits had not been worked out; and British tin must have had superabundant vitality if it reasserted itself two centuries after it had been ousted.