Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. T. Rice Holmes
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even by the Britons.1044
Looking at all these tokens of industrial enterprise, one is prepared to find evidences of increased comfort and more Agriculture. settled conditions of life. Since the Bronze Age agriculture had undoubtedly made a notable advance. It is impossible to tell whether the Britons, like the Gauls, recognized private property in land;1045 but archaeology has furnished abundant evidence, which confirms Caesar’s statement, that at all events in the south-eastern districts corn was grown in plenty. When he made his first expedition to Britain, his army, numbering at least twelve thousand men, reaped enough wheat in the near neighbourhood of Walmer to supply its wants for a fortnight or more; while in the following year he requisitioned from the people of Essex grain for four legions with their auxiliaries and seventeen hundred cavalry, which was delivered within a few days.1046 An iron sickle and a ploughshare found in Bigbury camp near Canterbury;1047 traces of terrace cultivation on the Sussex downs;1048 grain of several kinds stored in Worlebury Fort, in the Glastonbury lake-village, and in Hunsbury, where also were found fragments of stone querns in such profusion that every family may well have possessed its own, bear witness to the industry of the British farmers.1049 So also perhaps do the famous dene-holes of Kent, Essex, and Norfolk, whose purpose has been a theme of voluminous controversy, but of which the most satisfactory explanation seems to be that they were for the most part subterranean granaries, which may have been used as refuges in time of danger, and that the chalk extracted in the process of excavation was used, as Pliny says, for manuring fields.1050 Under the necessity of cultivating fresh land considerable progress must have been made in clearing the forests; and axes, saws, and bill-hooks, with which the woodmen worked, are still to be seen.1051 It is true that even in the more civilized south the great Wealden Forest, in which swine, guarded by fierce dogs, fed secure among wolves and foxes, badgers, and deer, still extended beyond the chalk downs from the neighbourhood of West Hythe to the eastern border of Hampshire, reached northward as far as Sevenoaks, and skirted the Surrey Hills; while great parts of Essex were overgrown with wood; another forest overshadowed the valley of the Kennet from Hungerford to Windsor; and the Isle of Ely was surrounded by broad meres, swelled by the heavier rains which fell in those days.1052 But even in Essex much timber must have been removed to make room for the cornfields from which the Trinovantes supplied Caesar’s legions, and in Kent to form the denes in which cattle grazed; while of those myriad homesteads which Caesar passed on his devastating march not a few must have been built upon reclaimed land.
Dwellings of the rich.
The researches of the eminent scholar who has so greatly enlarged our knowledge of Roman Britain have led him to suggest that among these homesteads there may have been, besides the round Celtic huts, dwellings, belonging to the rich, which might almost be described as country houses. Under Roman administration the rural parts of Britain, as of Northern Gaul, were parcelled into estates, the owners of which let out the greater part to cultivators who were in a state of semi-serfdom, while their demesne lands were tilled by slaves. The houses belong to two types, known as the Corridor type and the Courtyard type, neither of which exists anywhere save in Britain and the north of Gaul. The corridor house consisted of a row of rooms with a passage running along them: the other of three such rows, which formed three sides of a quadrangle. Since there is little resemblance between either of these types and those of Italy, it may be assumed that the extant examples of both, although they had been made luxurious by Roman mosaics and hypocausts and baths, were but modified representatives of the chieftains’ houses which Caesar saw.1053
Towns.
Nor were petty hamlets and isolated cottages the only places of abode. Town-life was beginning to emerge. The Britons, like the Gauls, had large fortified villages, which afterwards gave place to the flourishing Romano-British towns whose secrets are being revealed by pick and shovel. Camulodunum, or Colchester, the chief town of the Trinovantes, and Verulamium, hard by St. Albans, the chief town of the Catuvellauni, each of which had its mint before the Roman conquest, were doubtless tribal centres before Caesar came.1054 So too, probably, was Corinium, the capital of the Dobuni, which stood upon the site of Cirencester;1055 and Calleva, now Silchester, the excavation of which has been pursued for many years with illuminating results, was surrounded by a rampart which had evidently defended the capital of the Atrebates in pre-Roman times.1056 London, which, if we may trust Ptolemy,1057 was in the territory of the Cantii, was probably not less ancient; for Augusta, the name which Roman officialism endeavoured to impose upon it, was unable to resist the vitality of the Celtic appellation.1058 Imaginative historians have pictured British London in the midst of a vast lagoon;1059 but although the site of Westminster Abbey was an island surrounded by a marsh, and the Walbrook, where it flowed into the Thames, was little less than a hundred yards in width, it was proved during the construction of a sewer in London Wall that the land on the north side of the city had in Roman times been as dry as it is to-day.1060
Hill-forts.
The tribal capitals were of course fortified; but the old hill strongholds of the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age had not been abandoned; and new ones were doubtless constructed as occasion required. Among those that have yielded remains of the Late Celtic Period the most famous are Worlebury, which crowns a headland just north of Weston-super-mare; Hod Hill, which rises sheer above the valley of the Stour, four miles north-west of Blandford; Bigbury Camp, through which runs the Pilgrim’s Way; and Winkelbury Camp in South Wiltshire, Mount Caburn, overhanging Lewes, and Cissbury Camp, already mentioned for its neolithic factory, which have been excavated by General Pitt-Rivers. Worlebury is the most remarkable of the few stone forts in the west of England. Unlike the great earthworks it has no ditch, because it needed none; and on its northern side a limestone precipice rendered fortification superfluous. The rampart is a vast wall, compacted with rubble and faced on either side with dry masonry; and, to prevent an enemy from demolishing it, the outer face was buttressed by heaps of loose stones. Many of the modern walls in the neighbourhood of the fortress are indistinguishable from it in structure.1061 At Winkelbury large openings were left in that part of the rampart which is contiguous to the plain, probably to enable cattle to be driven in rapidly when marauders were near; while another rampart, which bisects the camp, may have been designed to separate the cattle-pound from the quarters of the garrison.1062 Cissbury, the principal fort on the Sussex Downs, was one of the few British strongholds which appear to have had access to a permanent supply of water: about a mile and a half off, at a place called Broadwater, is a spring, abundant enough for an army, which is connected by a trackway with the southern entrance.1063 The most characteristic feature of Mount Caburn is the number of pits which, as at Worlebury, are contained within its area. In both camps these pits are so small that they could not have been ordinarily inhabited, although, during a siege, they might have afforded shelter: probably they were used as store-rooms, for some of them contained corn.1064 Dwellings, however, were connected with them; for the remains of a clay wall were discovered on Mount Caburn, impressed with marks of wattle-work; and it may be inferred that many such huts, which have left no trace, once existed within the ramparts.1065 Bigbury was probably one of the entrenchments of which Caesar was thinking when he said that ‘the Britons apply the term fortress to woods difficult of access and fortified with rampart and trench in which they are in the habit of taking refuge from a hostile raid’.1066 The familiar sentence was a stumbling-block to Pitt-Rivers; for, as we have seen, the British forts were as a rule constructed upon treeless heights, and the presence of trees upon the slopes would have been incompatible with the designs of the engineers: but Caesar’s observations must of course be accepted; and we can only suppose that the entrenchments which he described were exceptional even in the region which was the theatre of his campaign.1067 May we conjecture that they had been erected in the Iron Age by Celtic immigrants, and that their lack of finish was due to the lazy shrinking from the hard labour of fortification which Caesar regarded as characteristic of the Gauls?1068
The fort of Pen-y-Gaer, which overlooks the valley of the Conway, is remarkable as an almost unique specimen of ancient military engineering. A storming-party which had succeeded in passing the two outer ditches would have fallen, in attempting the next, under the missiles that showered from the rampart, on to chevaux de frise of pointed stones.1069
Some permanently inhabited.
The relics that have been collected from the hill-forts of the Iron Age prove that the forts themselves, like