WHEN “the devil looked over Lincoln” he is said to have smiled at man’s costly devotion. But if the smile of the arch-enemy of mankind was, as must be supposed, in derision of man’s attempts at progress, the occasion of it was singularly ill-chosen, for in the whole of Britain it would be difficult to find a tract for the well-being of which man has exerted himself so much and so successfully. Two thousand years ago, that broad but not unbroken plain which extends from the Wash to the Humber, from the Trent and the uplands of Nottingham and Derby to the German Ocean was composed of arid heath and moorish fen, contributing little to the material support of man, and probably nothing to his moral culture. Beasts of chase, fish, and water-fowl shared the territory with savage hordes, but little removed from the animals upon which they preyed. By slow degrees, by many generations of men, labouring through many centuries, great things have been achieved. The fen has been banked and drained, and the heath brought under culture, so that the whole expanse is now covered by green pastures and rich root crops, and year after year the autumnal sun is reflected from broad fields waving with golden grain.
Nor has the moral been behind the material progress. From the castled hill of Belvoir, to the rocks of Newark and Nottingham, and the crowned promontory of Lincoln, the land bristles with the works of man. The constructive taste and skill of many generations, and their deep religious feeling, are represented by a rich variety of ecclesiastical architecture, from the rude and primitive tower of Barton to the lordly spires of Louth and Newark, and the glorious lanthorn of Boston; churches and schools, mansion-houses and granges, “tower and village, dome and farm,” are unmistakable evidences of peace, prosperity, and civilisation. There, too, are to be seen, not sparingly scattered, the sunken arch and ruined aisle, the ivy-covered remains and richly-carved fragments of many religious houses, making pleasant the study of hoar antiquity, and reminding us that there was a time when each was a centre of gospel truth, and of an early and beneficial civilisation, the abode of men who did good work in their day, and founded by those who—
“Loved the Church so well, and gave so largely to it,
They thought it should have canopied their bones
Till Domesday.”
Something of all this is visible to mere mortal ken, and far more to him who adds to the material prospect a knowledge of the past and the distant. It is true that the vision thus beheld from the guarded mount of Lincoln is not equal to that far wider and more noble outlook from a more exalted pinnacle, upon the description of which Milton has poured forth in one glittering roll the full stream of his learning, illuminated by the fire of his genius, but it is nevertheless one in which the student of the past may well take delight.
Lincoln itself is thickly strewed with the footsteps of the past. The Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Englishman, and the Norman, have successively been lords of the soil, and each has left his mark, either in material traces or in a nomenclature still less liable to decay. A great historian, our chief authority also in matters of topography, has pronounced the earthworks to the north of the city to be of British origin. If this be so, they must be the work of those Romanised Britons who attempted, though in vain, to hold their country against the Picts and Scots, and the Scandinavian hordes from beyond the German Ocean, and who, while so striving, showed some considerable acquaintance with the Roman rules of castrametation, though unequal, it would seem, to the works in masonry for which that people were so celebrated. The conclusion that these earthworks are, if not Roman, early post-Roman British, rests upon the fact that their outline is rectangular, and that the enclosure is bisected, nearly equally, by the Roman way.
Of the earlier Britons, those dispossessed by the Romans, the traces are slight indeed, and probably confined to a few nearly effaced intrenchments, and to the roots of such proper names as “Durnomagus,” “Segelocum,” “Banovallum,” on the Bane river, and “Lindum,” names which probably, like “Eboracum” and “Londinum,” represent an earlier appellation. The mound at Riseholme, if sepulchral, may, of course, be of any age; but the district, possessing but few of those grand features which are usually the earliest to receive their names and the latest to lose them, has retained no very obvious traces of its primal inhabitants.
Of their successors, the remains are of a very different character. The imperial mistress of the world left everywhere traces of her sway not easily to be obliterated. Her measures of war were also calculated—“pacis imponere morem.” From the station at Lindum great roads radiated in several directions, and preserved that facility of communication which civilised conquerors usually seek to establish.
In the modern city of Lincoln, the Roman Lindum is well represented. The Roman walls, 10 feet to 12 feet thick, and 20 feet to 25 feet high, included a nearly rectangular area, within which was the high ground of the upper city. Of this enclosure, the northern or upper end was cut off by a cross wall, and formed the military quarter, 385 yards north and south, by an average of 517 yards east and west. Of the four gates of the station, that to the north, upon the Ermine Street, still bears a name which must have descended from the time when it was first erected, and when it probably superseded an earlier structure, and is called the New-port. Of the opposite, or south gate, only one jamb remains. Of the east gate, the place is known, and a few of its very peculiar stones are built into the adjacent enclosures. The west gate was laid open a few years ago, but, as the arch gave way under the process, it was removed. Of the walls which connected these gates, some fragments remain. One lies west and another east of the north gate, and there is a considerable mass south of the north-east angle, capping which, the foundations of a round tower, of 9 feet interior diameter, have been discovered. There is also a fragment of wall in the slope of what is called the observatory mound, a little west of the remains of the south gate. The exterior ditch, also more or less Roman, is in parts very perfect, broad and deep along the north front, and, though narrower, deep and well preserved about the north-east angle. There is also, within the area, the side wall and part of the front of a considerable building, known, probably from its mediæval use, as the Mint. The exterior Roman walls are laid upon the natural ground, although the earth is heaped up against their inner face as a ramp or terrace.