Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

Dwellings of the rich.

The researches of the eminent scholar who has so greatly enlarged our knowledge of Roman Britain have led him to suggest that among these homesteads there may have been, besides the round Celtic huts, dwellings, belonging to the rich, which might almost be described as country houses. Under Roman administration the rural parts of Britain, as of Northern Gaul, were parcelled into estates, the owners of which let out the greater part to cultivators who were in a state of semi-serfdom, while their demesne lands were tilled by slaves. The houses belong to two types, known as the Corridor type and the Courtyard type, neither of which exists anywhere save in Britain and the north of Gaul. The corridor house consisted of a row of rooms with a passage running along them: the other of three such rows, which formed three sides of a quadrangle. Since there is little resemblance between either of these types and those of Italy, it may be assumed that the extant examples of both, although they had been made luxurious by Roman mosaics and hypocausts and baths, were but modified representatives of the chieftains’ houses which Caesar saw.[1053]

Towns.

Nor were petty hamlets and isolated cottages the only places of abode. Town-life was beginning to emerge. The Britons, like the Gauls, had large fortified villages, which afterwards gave place to the flourishing Romano-British towns whose secrets are being revealed by pick and shovel. Camulodunum, or Colchester, the chief town of the Trinovantes, and Verulamium, hard by St. Albans, the chief town of the Catuvellauni, each of which had its mint before the Roman conquest, were doubtless tribal centres before Caesar came.[1054] So too, probably, was Corinium, the capital of the Dobuni, which stood upon the site of Cirencester;[1055] and Calleva, now Silchester, the excavation of which has been pursued for many years with illuminating results, was surrounded by a rampart which had evidently defended the capital of the Atrebates in pre-Roman times.[1056] London, which, if we may trust Ptolemy,[1057] was in the territory of the Cantii, was probably not less ancient; for Augusta, the name which Roman officialism endeavoured to impose upon it, was unable to resist the vitality of the Celtic appellation.[1058] Imaginative historians have pictured British London in the midst of a vast lagoon;[1059] but although the site of Westminster Abbey was an island surrounded by a marsh, and the Walbrook, where it flowed into the Thames, was little less than a hundred yards in width, it was proved during the construction of a sewer in London Wall that the land on the north side of the city had in Roman times been as dry as it is to-day.[1060]

Hill-forts.

The tribal capitals were of course fortified; but the old hill strongholds of the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age had not been abandoned; and new ones were doubtless constructed as occasion required. Among those that have yielded remains of the Late Celtic Period the most famous are Worlebury, which crowns a headland just north of Weston-super-mare; Hod Hill, which rises sheer above the valley of the Stour, four miles north-west of Blandford; Bigbury Camp, through which runs the Pilgrim’s Way; and Winkelbury Camp in South Wiltshire, Mount Caburn, overhanging Lewes, and Cissbury Camp, already mentioned for its neolithic factory, which have been excavated by General Pitt-Rivers. Worlebury is the most remarkable of the few stone forts in the west of England. Unlike the great earthworks it has no ditch, because it needed none; and on its northern side a limestone precipice rendered fortification superfluous. The rampart is a vast wall, compacted with rubble and faced on either side with dry masonry; and, to prevent an enemy from demolishing it, the outer face was buttressed by heaps of loose stones. Many of the modern walls in the neighbourhood of the fortress are indistinguishable from it in structure.[1061] At Winkelbury large openings were left in that part of the rampart which is contiguous to the plain, probably to enable cattle to be driven in rapidly when marauders were near; while another rampart, which bisects the camp, may have been designed to separate the cattle-pound from the quarters of the garrison.[1062] Cissbury, the principal fort on the Sussex Downs, was one of the few British strongholds which appear to have had access to a permanent supply of water: about a mile and a half off, at a place called Broadwater, is a spring, abundant enough for an army, which is connected by a trackway with the southern entrance.[1063] The most characteristic feature of Mount Caburn is the number of pits which, as at Worlebury, are contained within its area. In both camps these pits are so small that they could not have been ordinarily inhabited, although, during a siege, they might have afforded shelter: probably they were used as store-rooms, for some of them contained corn.[1064] Dwellings, however, were connected with them; for the remains of a clay wall were discovered on Mount Caburn, impressed with marks of wattle-work; and it may be inferred that many such huts, which have left no trace, once existed within the ramparts.[1065] Bigbury was probably one of the entrenchments of which Caesar was thinking when he said that ‘the Britons apply the term fortress to woods difficult of access and fortified with rampart and trench in which they are in the habit of taking refuge from a hostile raid’.[1066] The familiar sentence was a stumbling-block to Pitt-Rivers; for, as we have seen, the British forts were as a rule constructed upon treeless heights, and the presence of trees upon the slopes would have been incompatible with the designs of the engineers: but Caesar’s observations must of course be accepted; and we can only suppose that the entrenchments which he described were exceptional even in the region which was the theatre of his campaign.[1067] May we conjecture that they had been erected in the Iron Age by Celtic immigrants, and that their lack of finish was due to the lazy shrinking from the hard labour of fortification which Caesar regarded as characteristic of the Gauls?[1068]

The fort of Pen-y-Gaer, which overlooks the valley of the Conway, is remarkable as an almost unique specimen of ancient military engineering. A storming-party which had succeeded in passing the two outer ditches would have fallen, in attempting the next, under the missiles that showered from the rampart, on to chevaux de frise of pointed stones.[1069]

Some permanently inhabited.

The relics that have been collected from the hill-forts of the Iron Age prove that the forts themselves, like those of Gaul, were not merely places of refuge but permanent abodes. Those that were situated on heights extremely difficult of access or remote from water were of course very sparsely inhabited in time of peace; but others were analogous to the Gallic fortresses which Caesar called oppida, and which were evidently distinct from the refuges, such as Aduatuca, which he designated as castella.[1070] Pottery, it is true, would have been indispensable even during a few days’ siege; and the stone lamp, resembling that of Grimes’s Graves,[1071] and blackened by use, which was recovered from Castle Law in Perthshire,[1072] might well have been needed at such a time. But when we find bill-hooks, ploughshares, bridle-bits, and fragments of querns among the objects that had been left in the forts which have been mentioned, it is clear that they were occupied by an industrial population: iron slag, which lay among the deposits on Hod Hill, was evidence of metallurgy; while the loom-weights which were collected on the same spot, the bone weaving-combs of Cissbury and Mount Caburn, and the spindle-whorls which abounded not only in these comparatively civilized settlements but also in a stone fortress on far St. David’s Head show that among the inhabitants were women who pursued their ordinary domestic avocations.[1073] This Welsh stronghold was almost identical in construction with Carn Brea,[1074] and the hut-circles which the two contain are exactly alike; yet the time which had elapsed since the Cornish ramparts were thrown up was as long as that which separates us from Alfred the Great.[1075]

Although many of the Scottish forts can be referred to the Early Iron Age, it would perhaps be impossible to prove that the relics found in any of them were earlier than the time of Caesar’s invasion;[1076] but two have an interest of their own as being the only examples that have yet been observed in Britain of fortifications constructed, like the Gallic walls which he described,[1077] conjointly of timber and stone. In one of them, situated at Burghead near Elgin, wooden logs were actually discovered in the stone walls;[1078] while at Castle Law, which stands upon a hill commanding a view over the Tay, as it winds through the carse on the west and loses itself in its eastern estuary, the outer face of the wall contained rectangular openings, which had manifestly been designed for the reception of beams.[1079]