(Afterward known as “St. Helena,” the mother of Constantine.) A.D. 255.
Ever since that far-off day in the infancy of the world, when lands began to form and rivers to flow seaward, the little river Colne has wound its crooked way through the fertile fields of Essex eastward to the broad North Sea.
Through hill-land and through moor-land, past Moyns and Great Yeldham, past Halstead and Chappel and the walls of Colchester, turning now this way and now that until it comes to Mersea Island and the sea, the little river flows to-day even as it sped along one pleasant summer morning sixteen hundred and forty years ago, when a little British princess, only fairly in her teens, reclined in comfortable contentment in her gilded barge and floated down the river from her father’s palace at Colchester to the strand at Wivanloe.
For this little girl of fourteen, Helena, the princess, was a king’s daughter, and, according to all accounts, a very bright and charming girl besides—which all princesses have not been. Her father was Coel, second prince of Britain and king of that part of ancient England, which includes the present shires of Essex and of Suffolk, about the river Colne.
Not a very large kingdom this, but even as small as it was, King Coel did not hold it in undisputed sway. For he was one of the tributary princes of Britain, in the days when Roman arms, and Roman law, and Roman dress, and Roman manners, had place and power throughout England, from the Isle of Wight, to the Northern highlands, behind whose forest-crowned hills those savage natives known as the Picts—“the tattooed folk”—held possession of ancient Scotland, and defied the eagles of Rome.
The monotonous song of the rowers, keeping time with each dip of the broad-bladed oars, rose and fell in answer to the beats of the master’s silver baton, and Helena too followed the measure with the tap, tap, of her sandaled foot.
Suddenly there shot out around one of the frequent turns in the river, the gleam of other oars, the high prow of a larger galley, and across the water came the oar-song of a larger company of rowers. Helena started to her feet.
“Look, Cleon,” she cried, pointing, eagerly towards the approaching boat, “‘t is my father’s own trireme. Why this haste to return, think’st thou?”
“I cannot tell, little mistress,” replied the freedman Cleon, her galley-master; “the king thy father must have urgent tidings, to make him return thus quickly to Camalodunum.”
Both the girl and the galley-master spoke in Latin, for the language of the Empire was the language of those in authority or in official life even in its remotest provinces, and the galley-master did but use the name which the Roman lords of Britain had given to the prosperous city on the Colne, in which the native Prince, King Coel, had his court—the city which to-day is known under its later Saxon name of Colchester.