Here, crossing at Heybridge, we may say good-bye to history for a while and devote ourselves to things more mundane. At Heybridge we are about as near the sea-level as we can be. In two miles and a half we climb two hundred feet or more, and then we follow the top of a ridge for four miles to Tiptree. For me, before the Essex manœuvres, Tiptree simply spelled "jam" in seven letters, none of them appearing in that familiar word. To be plain, Tiptree jam is far better than any "home-made" comestible of the kind it has been my fortune to encounter, because it has all the purity of the domestic product, while it is made with all care and knowledge that science and experience can furnish. A cook or a careful housewife has many distractions of puddings, entrées, sauces, savouries, and what you will. Tiptree devotes all its energy and intelligence to jam, and the result is a divine confection, pure ambrosia. Tiptree will not thank me for this advertisement because the name of Tiptree is established. To many it will appear as superfluous to praise the jams of Tiptree as it would be to state that two and two make four, or that '47 port is excellently good. Still, experience has shown the existence of a benighted but considerable minority who will infallibly be grateful for the knowledge, if they use it. If they do not, so much the worse for them. Without doubt the fame of the Tiptree jams must involve prosperity also, and the district, with its trim orchards, a sea of bloom in late spring and loaded with rosy fruit in the autumn, is full of encouragement to one who believes that where land is not made to pay something is rotten in the state. It is a pretty sight too, and one recalling sundry speeches of the late Mr. Gladstone which were not taken very seriously when they were uttered. Other crops you will find hereabouts—it was at Tiptree, as told elsewhere, that the military balloon came down in the middle of a crop of bird-seed—and the whole district gives one the impression of being in the hands of persons, courageous and competent, who refuse to meet the difficulties of farming with mere lamentation but, like the farmers of Ingatestone at the time of the 1897 disaster, are resolved to make the best of things.
That spirit is traditional at Tiptree. Was it not there that the great Mr. Mechi, who flourished in the middle of the last century, produced wondrous results by plentiful use of liquid manure, and proved the profitable quality of beans in such fashion as to astonish his contemporaries? To men of his quality, who made two blades of grass grow where but one grew before, I for one insist upon giving all praise and honour, and, when one thinks upon their good work, there is a disposition to feel that, in its proper place, a trim hedge is not without its attraction, what though it be not nearly so beautiful as one that is a straggling thicket of hawthorn, honeysuckle and wild rose. But a doubting afterthought rises. Mr. Mechi farmed from 1840 to 1870, perhaps longer. His Profitable Farming, with its striking figures, was published during that period, and those were piping times for agriculture. Could he have shown accounts even half or a quarter as good for the thirty years from 1875 to 1905?
We have reached Tiptree in imagination from Maldon, and there is no difficulty in doing so by road from the same place. As a matter of fact, my first visit to Tiptree was made from Braintree, whither a morning expedition had been taken to see if General Wynne was at his accustomed post, and the ignis fatuus which lured me and a companion in that direction was the balloon, seen in the air from a long distance, which we found afterwards in the bird-seed field. (In passing, as the officer in the car of the balloon had seen nothing at all of the troops shrouded from his view, the inference that balloons are of precious little use in a wooded country would seem to be fairly obvious.) Leaving the balloon to its fate—although the officer would have liked to commandeer our car for the transport of his mass of collapsed silk—we proceeded by way of Messing to Heckford Bridge. Of these the first-named has been suggested by a learned antiquary, the Reverend H. Jenkins, as a possible site for the stark battle in which Suetonius wiped the army of Boadicea out of existence and avenged the massacre of Camulodunum: "Whoever visits the camp at Haynes Green, near the village of Messing, will be struck with the resemblance it bears to the position taken up by Suetonius. Two large woods, Pod's Wood and Layer Marney Wood, seem to form the narrow gorge in front of the camp which Tacitus mentions." Merivale, who says that the speculations of Mr. Jenkins were useful to him, although he could not go all the way with them, describes the position of Suetonius thus: "In a valley between undulating hills, with woods in the rear, and the ramparts of the British oppidum" (Lexden) "not far perhaps on his right, he had every advantage for marshalling his slender forces.... Ten thousand resolute men drew their swords for the Roman Empire in Britain. The natives, many times their number, spread far and wide over the plain; but they could assault the narrow front of the Romans with only few battalions at once, and their wagons, which conveyed their accumulated booty and bore their wives and children, thronged the rear, and cut off almost the possibility of retreat."
Now there is no doubt that places become manifold more interesting if one can fill the scene, so to speak, with action and actors of long ago. Westminster Hall would be majestic if it had no associations, but few men enter it for the first time without recalling the trial of Charles the First. A well-known tract near Brussels would attract no pilgrims if the freedom of Europe had not been won on its fields. The case is the same with Messing. If there be cause for saluting it as the place where Briton and Roman met in a conflict to the death every fold in the ground stirs the imagination. But when an antiquary talks of two large woods as seeming to form a narrow gorge, and a clerical historian writes of a "valley between undulating hills," of a wood in the rear, of a plain in front over which the natives "spread far and wide," and locates the wagons in the rear, only one course is open to me. It is to forget the six and twenty years which have passed since last I faced the "small but well-armed tribe" of the examiners, during which there has been neither occasion nor desire to read Latin prose works, to ignore the terrors of the historic present and of what I believe used to be called oratio obliqua, and to refer to Tacitus, upon whom both these clerical gentlemen relied for information. One sentence disposes of the question of position. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had ten thousand armed men when he made up his mind to give battle, "and he picks a place with narrow jaws and closed in by a wood at the rear, well assured that there was no part of the enemy save in the front, and that the plain was open, without fear of ambushes." There is nothing to suggest that the sides of the defile were wooded, as Mr. Jenkins thought they might have been, or that there was any wood at all except in the rear. Indeed, the probability is the other way. Still less is there any word to explain why Dean Merivale invented "a valley between undulating hills." Indeed, the description of the defile by the word fauces (which has been translated literally) conveys a sharper and more rugged idea than our word "valley," which, of course, comes directly from vallis and carries the same meaning. In fact, the "gorge" of Mr. Jenkins is the better translation, and undulating hills would have given Boadicea a chance of taking Suetonius in flank. The wagons apparently were drawn up in a crescent behind the British so that their occupants might see the fight.
That is all concerning the position, and it is really mere guess-work on the part of Dean Merivale to suggest that the great battle was fought anywhere near Colchester. All we know is that Suetonius determined to leave London to its fate, and St. Albans also, and that Merivale thought "the situation of Camulodunum, enclosed in its old British lines, and backed by the sea, would offer him a secure retreat where he might defy attack and await reinforcements; and the insurgents, after their recent triumphs, had abandoned their first conquests to wreak their fury on other seats of Roman civilization. While, therefore, the Iceni sacked and burnt first Verulamium (St. Albans) and then London Suetonius made, as I conceive, a flank march toward Camulodunum, and kept ahead of their pursuit, till he could choose his own position to await their attack." All this is pure fancy. All we know for certain is that Suetonius left London, then not a colonia but already a great centre of commerce and business, and St. Albans to their fate. There is not a particle of evidence whither he went; and there was less reason to go to Camulodunum than to any place; for it had recently been sacked by the Iceni under Boadicea, and resistance had been hopeless because the colonists had taken no steps in the way of preparing defences. The "old British lines" of Camulodunum had seemed to the veteran colonists of so little use when they were attacked that they made their only stand, and that to no avail, in the Temple of Claudius. In fact there is no evidence to show which way Suetonius marched, or where the defile was, with the wood in rear, in which he induced Boadicea to attack him. Tacitus most likely did not know himself. He was not present. He was merely a Roman gentleman and an ex-official, of literary proclivities, writing a picturesque military history, partly from hearsay, partly from official records. He probably knew very little of the geography of Britain—not a very important province, be it remembered—and his desire, presumably, was to interest Roman readers and to give gratification to great men whom he liked, or from whom he might look for favour. He described the military position and showed Suetonius in the character of a capable general. To have done more, to have gone into geographical detail, would have puzzled his readers as English readers might be puzzled to-day by detailed allusions to unheard-of places in an unfamiliar part of the globe.
So there is no limit to the number of places—a gorge, with a wood behind and an open plain in front—capable of being accepted as the field of this particular battle. It may have been anywhere in southern England. Still if, like the Trojans when they were hoodwinked by the Greeks into opening the gates of Troy too soon, men would like to localize the field of battle somewhere, so that they may conjure up the scene anew, there is no reason in life why they should not amuse themselves thus at Messing. They can look at the camp at Haynes Green and conjure up in imagination the fourteenth legion in close ranks in the centre, with the cavalry massed on either flank. They can think they hear the general heartening them for the combat and telling them not to mind the yells of the savages—for that is what a high-sounding Latin paragraph comes to in effect. They can see in fancy Boadicea making the circuit of her warriors in a chariot, her outraged daughters in front of her, inciting her hearers to frenzy. They can gaze in imagination on the Neronian legionaries when, having exhausted their javelins on the attacking mobs ("battalions," which Merivale uses, is far too orderly a word), they charged the Britons en masse, and the cavalry joining them at the gallop with out-stretched lances. They can imagine the tangle of wagons, warriors, women and children into which the Roman soldiers plunged, sparing no living thing. Clara et antiquis victoriis par eâ die laus parta, says Tacitus. "The glory of that day was quite like the old victories. Men say that rather less than eighty thousand Britons fell as against four hundred soldiers killed and not many more wounded." They can believe that boast of a military historian who was away at Rome, if they like; and there is really no harm in their fancying that all this happened at Messing if they please. To do so will make Messing interesting, and nobody will ever be able to locate the battle anywhere else with any more certainty.
During the mimic warfare of a few years ago, as has been stated, I travelled from Tiptree to Messing on a Lanchester, and from Messing to Heckford Bridge. My recollection is of a pretty country, with many little ups and downs, of rich orchards, of oaks overshadowing the roads, and of green acorns which the soldiery seemed to enjoy, of abundant orchards and, last but not least, of abominable roads. But let me not be too hard on the roads. They were equal, no doubt, as byways go, to "the ordinary traffic of the district"; they were subjected to an extraordinary strain by long trains of transport wagons, which encumbered my course in such a manner as to make me full of sympathy now for the Britons who fell among their own wagons under Roman sword and spear. Even among those endless vehicles one could not fail to observe the beauty of spreading trees and innumerable variations of level, especially at Heckford Bridge. Somewhere thereabouts it was, I remember, that a privileged motor-car came upon companies of invaders and of defenders, within two hundred yards of one another, and each totally ignorant of the propinquity of the other. Bored as the manœuvring troops were—for men and officers will be bored by continuous marching during which they have not the slightest idea what is going on—this ignorance was not their fault. Most of the fields were out of bounds, and although military imagination might go so far as to imagine scouts—it imagined one hundred thousand men in support of General Wynne that day—it can hardly supply the warnings which those imaginary scouts would give if they were real. But the most cogent reason of this blind manœuvring was to be found in the rapid variations of contour, the patulous trees, and the abundant leafage. This gave to the scenery singular charm, even while it made the roads such as the merely rushing motorist would eschew. Not only were they narrow and exceeding crooked, they were also very wet and greasy, so that a moderate pace would have been compulsory in any circumstances. Still, if any rational motorists will take this little drive in a leisurely way, they will agree, as they bowl along the few miles of good high-road between Heckford Bridge and Colchester, that it is exceeding pleasant and well worthy to be taken.