APPENDIX C
In the course of the compilation of this History, the Author re-perused the Handbook to the Roman Wall, in the fifth edition, put forth by Mr. Robert Blair, many years after the death of the original compiler, Dr. Bruce. In the light of succeeding events it is curious to note what is said of Corstopitum, a site noted in the text as being near Hadrian's great line of wall and its defences. Thus the record runs:
This site, which lost its military importance with the retreat of the Romans, apparently became a commercial emporium, and underwent very various fortunes, culminating in its destruction by barbarians; so that, from the fifth century, it ceased to be from that day to this; no man dwelling on the site.
Mr. Blair says of the place itself:
Its form and extent gave it the aspect of a city rather than of a camp. Remains of a bridge across the Tyne are to be seen when the river is low. Excavations were made in the summer of 1906. Nothing of account was found except a few walls, an intaglio, some fragments of pottery and a few coins.
How frigid and disappointing is not this record! But listen to the story which Sir Arthur Evans related to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in his Presidential address at Newcastle last September:
The work at Corbridge, the ancient Corstopitum, begun in 1906, and continued down to the autumn of 1914, has already uncovered throughout a great part of its area the largest urban centre—civil as well as military in character—on the line of the Wall, and the principal store-house of its stations. Here (together with well-built granaries, workshops, and barracks, and other records of river life as are supplied by sculptured stones and inscriptions, and the double discovery of hoards of gold coins) has come to light a spacious and massively constructed stone building, apparently a military store-house, worthy to rank besides the bridge-piers of the North Tyne among the most important monuments of Roman Britain. There is much here, indeed, to carry our thoughts far beyond our insular limits. On this, as on so many other sites along the Wall, the inscriptions and reliefs take us very far afield. We mark the gravestone of a man of Palmyra, an altar of the Tyrian Hercules—its Phoenician Baal—a dedication to a pantheistic goddess of Syrian religion and the raised effigy of the Persian Mithra. So, too, in the neighbourhood of Newcastle itself, as elsewhere on the Wall, there was found an altar of Jupiter Dolichenus, the old Anatolian God of the Double Axe, the male form of the divinity once worshipped in the prehistoric Labyrinth of Crete. Nowhere are we more struck than in this remote extremity of the Empire with the heterogeneous religious elements, often drawn from its far Eastern borders, that before the days of the final advent of Christianity Roman dominion had been instrumental in diffusing. The Orontes may be said to have flowed into the Tyne as well as the Tiber.
This quotation has been given at length in order to sustain the contention—put forth more than once in this book—that treasures associated with the Roman epoch lie around us in every part of our island, and that all sorts of novel surprises mutely await the advent and quest of the diligent investigator.
But to return for a moment to Corstopitum. It has been realised that the city was a centre of iron-work and pottery-making to supply the needs of the troops. It furnished a base for the invasion of Caledonia by Lollius Urbicus in A.D. 140, and for the great expedition of Septimius Severus in A.D. 208. Much of the area excavated during 1906 and the following years has been filled in, but the most important buildings remain open—two large granaries, the fountain or public water-pant, and a large unfinished building, which may have been designed as a military storehouse, or as the praetorium of a legionary fortress which never came into being. The most remarkable finds made here have been the Corbridge lion in stone, which now enjoys an European reputation, and two hoards of gold coins, now in the British Museum.1
1 Vide Official Handbook to Newcastle and District, put forth on the occasion of the last visit of the British Association to that city.
The Map [above] gives the line of Hadrian's Wall through the two counties of Northumberland and Cumberland, viz., from Wallsend to Bowness, and indicates the principal places on the route. For further details of this absorbing subject the reader is referred to such works as the Proceedings and Transactions of learned societies, such as the Archæologia Æleana, or the Lapidarium Septentrionale. The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Vol. vii gives a full rendering of the inscriptions.