a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent,
beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan"
Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat
table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was,
in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath,
in Ogilby's _Britannia_ of 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing
between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on
the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some
30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of
slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for
the benefit of travellers going to or coming from Colchester across
the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of
a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village.
The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions
not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the
builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row
of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and
modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval,
stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more
ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and
shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now--figure to yourself the
shame of it!--overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it
"King Cole's Cottage."
Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may
lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the
Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary
General--according to varying legends--threw up the entrenchments,
and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say
advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke
across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden
Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman
entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long
enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been
"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend of Boadicea's
defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some
forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside
Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by
Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the
site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.
[Illustration: LEXDEN.]
Lexden village now claims attention. It is a place in which one school
of antiquaries finds the original Roman station of Camulodunum,
established on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of the
Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by another following.
Certainly, among the tall elms and rolling surface of Lexden Park there
are remains in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no
uncertain manner that this must have been a place of enormous strength,
by whomsoever held. The surroundings are weird and impressive to a
degree.
The village skirting the road is one of the prettiest on the way. Going
towards Colchester, the road drops down the hill, where old cottages
stand high above the pathway, with steep little gardens in front, kept
from sliding down into the road itself by lichened retaining-walls
sprouting with house-leek and draped with climbing plants. Lower
still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic atrocities are hung
about with ivy and creepers until they are transfigured into a dream
of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and neighbouring houses
is exquisite. Beyond this point begins the suburban approach to
Colchester, a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a proper
respect, for here was the first Roman colony in Britain. The history
of Colchester, indeed, begins so far back as A.D. 44, and there was
already a pre-historic native city in existence before then; the royal
city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin, the monarch famous in the
pages of Shakespeare as "Cymbeline."
XXVI
CUNOBELIN, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that part of the
country now divided into Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire,
Hunts, Cambridgeshire and Essex, was the successor of his father
Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously, with Julius Cæsar. He
transferred his capital from his native town on the site of St Albans
to where Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a powerful
ruler, and, if little is known of him, certainly he is no myth, for
the vague legends that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages
of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form of his own were
strikingly proved correct some years ago, when a hoard of gold coins
was ploughed up in their neighbourhood, bearing his title.
We do not know by what name Colchester was then styled. After Cunobelin
had died, full of years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,
Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of the native State over
which he had ruled speedily came. Adminius, in a fury against his
brothers, fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans, and if no
immediate result came, certainly his invitation must have revived
the old Cæsarian dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman
invasion that took place shortly after the death of Cunobelin was the
solicitation of a certain Bericus, a British Prince of whom nothing
appears to be known beyond this one fact.
The invasion took place in A.D. 43, under that able general, Aulus
Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes back from Hertfordshire and
Middlesex, across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where for a time
they could not be followed. This was the position at the close of the
year. Detached portions of the invading forces had overrun the south of
Britain as far as Gloucester and had defeated the tribes on the way;
leaving a garrison in the west. But the island was little known and
held many mysteries. None could tell the real strength of the natives,
who disappeared in the forests and marshes that covered the face of the
land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted the Roman plans of
campaign. Plautius was at last driven to act on the defensive on the
Essex borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken morasses
between the Thames and the Lea, and had the enemy possessed powers of
combination and military skill, he might well have been cut off here,
at the end of the known world. A retirement with his sick and dying was
impossible. Nothing remained but to go into camp during the winter, and
meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He accordingly sent for forces
from Gaul. They came with commendable promptitude, commanded by the
Emperor Claudius in person. With these new legions came an elephant
corps, brought from Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted
a better part than this, for their strange appearance terrified the
astonished Trinobantes a great deal more than any increase of the
Roman soldiery could have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing
irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and marshes on that
march into the Unknown, along this line of country now traversed by the
Norwich Road, and can readily understand little resistance being met
with on the way. The tribes were dispersed and their territory occupied
as far as the Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of the new
year, A.D. 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city--Colonia Camulodunum,
the first Roman settlement in Britain.
The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that
they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted
space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant
town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the
Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor
Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god
and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his
honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls
were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity
the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were
uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this
attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not
surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals,
who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon
their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods and
all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In
this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians,
exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the
priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since
passed.
These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more
than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated
a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose
frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled
over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate
the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he
had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other
moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his
country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She
was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities,
and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at
these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side
of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.
No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of
the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground,
and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an
enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying
disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house
of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In the estuary of
the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down,
and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the
tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest
whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed
at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air,
and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and
those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal,
a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to
fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the
town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all
slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a
defence of two days.
Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had
been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now
stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved
too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they
almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great
disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns,
placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones
of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been
reasserted.
These events happened in A.D. 61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then
Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with
the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these disasters
he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army
of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a
numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those
towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate,
which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed
than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand
citizens perished in that general massacre.
It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that
heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style
"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of
the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done
so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of
"personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality."
He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed,
harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below
her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a
highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over
it."
Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a
site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but
the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt
included Lexden Heath.
The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women
and children as spectators, and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a
great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says
they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing
her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die,
resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of
her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be
dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.
The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive.
When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers
of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing
in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the
semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this
way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand
Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out
to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost,
poisoned herself.
Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time
date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined
not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony,
and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city,
they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands,
overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area
of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than
eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in
Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not
extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed--notably
to the north and north-east and on the west--the ramparts still look
out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to
eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses
of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich;
the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite
innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this
day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of
Colchester's walls were cut.
Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than
three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events of A.D.
61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating
a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these
events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from
Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and
conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity.
Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,
and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries,
gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as
a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority
are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British
princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way
the British in some measure came into their own again, and to these
circumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old
King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall,
the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and
the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the
very name of Colchester itself--"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,
according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage.
Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of
semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal
sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story
goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, in A.D.
293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus,
on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who
became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer
of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a
ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the
Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which
Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross
very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the
gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.
To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the
legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or
have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived
from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested
the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the
town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have
been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named.
Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves
had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.
"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily
treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper.
That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically
assures us.
"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for his
fiddlers three."
Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The
author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain
did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity, _A
Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_.
XXVII
THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road
leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the
street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished
monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer
suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the
left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back
door into the town.
Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the
continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was
in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and
less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only
way to or from London into the town.
How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in
Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many
ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now
quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself
remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt
to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a
little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning
to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome
is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above
a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands
revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the
steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness
of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic
contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a
place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the
legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping
in peaceful days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where
the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and
a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred
years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn
courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can
be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot
passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the
admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest
trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the
Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the
most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo"
brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester
far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy
thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is
very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail
to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their
ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not
very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not
notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he
is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of
the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however
well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable,
with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with
pearl-powder.
Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's
waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and
there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in
England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its
surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown
place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name,
for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the
effigy of an elephant.