Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  The first Roman Colonia, Camalodunum, though an unwalled town, seems to have been a place of some dignity as “an image of Roman civilisation.” It had a temple of Claudius, statues of Victory and of Nero, and even a theatre, probably on the site of the semicircular excavation near the Grimes Dyke, west of Lexden, now popularly known as King Coel’s Kitchen. But when the Iceni of Norfolk and Suffolk began their great insurrection under Boadicea, they poured down upon the defenceless Roman colony and completely blotted out the new Camalodunum with all its Italian [and Italianate] inhabitants, estimated at 70,000 [?] persons. The victory of Suetonius restored the Roman authority; and the conqueror rebuilt Camalodunum as a fortified post on its present site, a little to the east of the first city. The rectangular walls which Suetonius then laid out still enclose the modern Colchester on almost every side. They consist of alternate courses of brick and cut stone, and may be admirably seen at the Crutched Friars and all along the west boundary of the town. Two main roads crossed each other with military precision near the centre, one of which even yet forms the quiet High Street; but the houses along its course now swerve a little from the original line between All Saints’ and St. Runwald’s, so that the street is no longer flush with the old Prætorian gate at the western outlet, though it still preserves its original exit at the east end. It requires only a slight stretch of imagination even now, as one looks down upon the square Roman town from the top of St. John’s Green, to restore mentally the baths, the temples, and the villas, or to re-people the High Street with a provincial crowd in white togas and a company of legionaries in the full uniform of the Antonine age. Colonia was always one of the great fortresses for the defence of the Thames entrance from the Saxon pirates, and it shared with Othonæ [Ythanceaster] and Rutupiæ [Richborough] the task of guarding the approaches of the great river and the rising commercial post of London. Its general importance was greatest, however, while the Romans still held only the south-eastern portion of the island, and it decidedly declined as the military centres moved away to York and Chester.

  When the unwieldy empire began to fall asunder of internal decay, and Britain was abandoned to the advancing wave of Teutonic barbarism, the country of the Trinovantes must have been one of the first to fall into the hands of the heathen invaders. We have no record of the struggle here, not even the scanty glimmer of a legend to light us as in Kent. But the plain facts speak out eloquently for themselves in the very forms of local nomenclature. The East Saxons who gave their name to Essex must almost necessarily have begun by the capture of Colonia. But here, as elsewhere, the invaders do not seem to have altogether destroyed the British inhabitants, and there are many distinct marks of continuity from Roman into English times. The town itself retained its old name as Colne-ceaster — that is to say, the castrum [of the Colonia], — gradually softened into Colchester; and even the stream was known as the Colne — in other words, the Colony River. Headgate Street preserves to this day its quaint translation of the Porta Capitalis; and the dark, long-headed British physique has survived all the Saxon and Danish conquests in many quarters of the ancient borough. Indeed, curious legends of their former greatness seem to have long survived among the Anglicised Celtic serfs, who attributed all the chief Roman works to a British prince Coel, the “old King Cole” of our nursery legends. This Coel may possibly have been a real personage, but is much more probably derived by popular etymology from the first syllable of Colchester itself. In later mediæval romance he appears as Coel, Duke of Caercolvin: and his name is attached both to King Coel’s kitchen and to the chief bastion of the Roman wall, known as Colking’s Castle. The position of the title after instead of before the name in this last form belongs to the early or Anglo-Saxon stage of the language [?], and [has been held to prove] the antiquity of the semi-Celtic legend; so that here, as in many other places, Geoffrey of Monmouth was probably a mere adapter of pre-existing popular material, rather than a fabricator of purely original romance. The town no doubt fell somewhat into decay during the early English period; and when the East Saxons were converted to Christianity, their bishop-stool was placed not here, but in the great East Saxon dependency of London. Colchester slowly grew up again, however, during the age of peace, and was occupied by the Danes when they conquered Essex. Edward the Elder recovered it in his great campaign against the Scandinavians of Mercia; but he built no fortifications, as the town still retained its Roman walls in a serviceable state.

  After the Norman conquest Eudo, the Dapifer of the Conqueror, obtained possession of Colchester, and [a royal castle was] built on a rising ground in the centre of the town, the site no doubt of the original dun. Its low, square, ivy-clad keep alone now remains, constructed in part of Roman tiles, and double the size of the White Tower in London. The museum within contains many relics of Colonia, vases of red ware from Caistor, amphoræ, queer little tutelary gods, and other scanty remnants of the old city. A Norman moot-hall of the same date was barbarously destroyed some forty years ago. It was Eudo, too, who founded St. John’s Abbey, a great Benedictine house, whose chief was one of the mitred abbots of England. This splendid building was destroyed during the siege by the Parliamentarians, and the only remaining relic is the great gateway of the fifteenth century, which stands outside the walls, near the Walton Station. Another important religious house of nearly the same period was St. Botolph’s Priory, an Augustinian foundation, going back to the days of Henry I., and dedicated to that Botulf or Botwulf who founded Boston or Botulfstun — a saint of the first English period, once very popular throughout all eastern England. Its Norman church now stands in stately ruins; the priory buildings have wholly disappeared. These religious houses doubtless helped to keep the town alive during the Middle Ages; but as a whole it seems to have existed chiefly as an agricultural centre for eastern Essex, aided perhaps by the usual barbaric convenience of the Roman building material. When the export trade in wool with the Low Countries arose, Colchester and Hythe apparently gained in importance; and during the reign of Elizabeth, when the woollen manufacture began to shift from Flanders to the east of England, a body of Walloons settled here and introduced the local trade in “bays and says.” Till the middle of the eighteenth century the town flourished and increased on this great national industry; but then the employment of water-power, and later on of coal, transferred it slowly to the power-looms of the north of England. The siege under Fairfax had largely destroyed the best buildings; and Colchester has since languished on agriculture, silk, soldiers, and above all, oysters. It is now a quiet military centre, with a pleasant old-world air, living mainly on its traditions, and fuller of interest for the antiquary than for other people.

  NORWICH

  The capital of the East Anglian plain may fairly claim to be reckoned among the most venerable of English cities; certainly there have been few others whose prosperity has been so continuous and so little chequered. Standing as it does in the centre of a great architectural champaign, its site has been marked out for many centuries as the natural trading centre for a large and populous surrounding district. Even before the days of the Roman conquest, the most powerful of British tribes, the Iceni, inhabiting the widest agricultural stretch in England, had fixed their chief town on the banks of the Wensum, at the spot where Norwich now stands; and the artificial mound at present capped by the restored keep of the Norman castle was originally piled up as the rampart of a stockaded village by the hands of Icenian labourers. Fosse and earthworks are almost the sole relics, however, here left behind by the aboriginal Celt, save only the great war-track of the Icknield Way or Icenian road [?], which ran from Norwich far into the heart of the island, and still preserves in its name the memory of the old supremacy wielded over the midland tribes by the powerful masters of East Anglia. The [capital of the] fertile plain around was known to its Celtic inhabitants as the Gwent — a word also applied to the [capitals of] similar stretches of alluvial soil about Winchester and on the Monmouth coast. When the Romans conquered the eastern coun
ties they do not seem to have fixed their chief station of Gwent — their Venta Icenorum — on the exact site of the older British capital; at least, no traces of their occupation have occurred in modern Norwich; and the true position of Venta was almost certainly at Caistor, three miles south of the city, where the great square Italian ramparts, now overgrown with ancient elms, have yielded many interesting remains in bronze and terra-cotta. As often elsewhere, the Roman camp probably stood a little apart from the British village — much as our own cantonments and civil stations in India still stand somewhat apart from the crowded bazaar and the tortuous alleys of the native town. Perhaps, indeed, a camp existed at Caistor even before the rebellion of Boadicea; and if so, the Icenian capital may then have remained wholly in the hands of its original possessors. However that may be, it may be taken for granted that in later provincial times the true centre of the East Anglian plain was at Venta, and that the primitive village on the exact site of Norwich was for the time partially deserted.

  After the departure of the Romans, the exposed Icenian country was one of the first parts of Britain to be occupied by the English invaders. The mouth of the Yare — at that time, as Lyell has shown, an open estuary — gave the pirates a free water-way into the heart of the fertile [plain]. They had first to storm the guardian fortress of Gariononum, now Burgh Castle, which defended the mouth of the estuary; and their vessels could then sail straight up the tidal expanse as far as Venta itself. Doubtless they destroyed the Roman town more or less completely; its very name being afterwards forgotten in the general descriptive title of Caistor, an easy corruption of Ceaster or Castrum. But the place must, nevertheless, almost necessarily have remained inhabited, as the natural centre of the new East Anglian kingdom, which soon grew up from the coalescence of the English clan villages. At any rate, when first East Anglia distinctly reappears in history, we find the city on the Wensum its recognised capital. As the river silted up around Caistor, the older site seems to have been resumed; and it was now known as North-wic, the northern port or harbour — a name whose analogy in sound and sense to that of Norfolk, the North Folk, is probably quite accidental. Doubtless both St. Edmund of East Anglia and the Scandinavian conqueror Guthrum had their chief seat at Norwich. When the Danes under Swegen attacked East Anglia, they captured Norwich and Thetford, then evidently its two most important towns: for the pirates always made first for the largest booty. At the date of the Norman conquest, Norwich, with its twelve Danish lawmen, was manifestly the capital of Danicised East Anglia. Shortly after, a castle, to overawe the English burghers, was built on the summit of the old Icenian mound: the great arch of the bridge, the buttressed and arcaded keep, and the scanty ruins of the towers, though barbarously restored to enclose the modern gaol, are still all of the original Norman design. Here Ralph Wader kept his Court; and here was planned “that bride ale, many men’s bale,” which was the prelude to the last rebellion of the native English against William’s power. The earldom and castle were afterwards granted to the Bigods, who held them with some intermission till the days of Edward I.

  As yet, however, Norwich was merely the temporal capital of East Anglia; the great cathedral was still unbuilt, and the bishop-stool had still its place, after the old English fashion, in a lesser country town of the diocese. The primitive see of the independent East Anglian kingdom had been fixed at the first conversion by Bishop Felix at Dunwich, in Suffolk. Archbishop Theodore divided the diocese into two — one for the North Folk, with its see at Elmham, and the other for the South Folk at the original see of Dunwich. The first Norman bishop [of the North Folk] removed his residence from Elmham to Thetford; and towards the close of the eleventh century Bishop Herbert Losinga, following the usual Norman custom, again removed it to Norwich, where he began the erection of the existing cathedral. In spite of many later additions and alterations, the building has preserved its Norman plan far more fully than almost any other English minster. The importance of Norwich must have been greatly increased by this concentration of the earldom and the bishopric within its walls. Castle, cathedral, and Benedictine monastery form thenceforth the central pivots of its written history. But Norwich is also remarkable as being perhaps the very oldest manufacturing town in all England, the Manchester or Bradford of the early Middle Ages. While the relations of England were all with the continent of Europe it was inevitable that her chief towns should all point eastward; and many other causes conspired to make Norwich naturally one of the earliest seats of English manufacture. It lay on a secure estuary, facing the young commercial cities of the Low Countries, and it occupied the centre of the richest sheep-feeding district in all civilised south-eastern England. As early as the reign of Henry I., a body of Flemings, exiled by an irruption of the sea, settled down in the little isolated village of Worstead, near North Walsham, and introduced the trade in what was thenceforth known as worsteds. Norwich speedily grew into the chief centre of the new industry. It was at this time that the labyrinth of narrow and shapeless lanes around the market-place first grew up, bearing testimony to the crowded population then densely packed within the old city walls. Under Edward I. the burgh returned two burgesses to Parliament, as it has ever since continued to do. Edward III. made it into one of his privileged staples for the woollen trade, of which it had a monopoly in all Norfolk and Suffolk. The immense relative importance of the town during the Middle Ages is shown by its possession of no fewer than thirty-five mediæval churches at the present day, besides the cathedral, though [as] many were destroyed at the Reformation. Most of them are perpendicular, ranging from 1350 to 1500, the Augustan age of the eastern woollen manufacture; two, St. Peter’s Mancroft and St. Andrew’s, possess great architectural interest of their own. Like other factory districts of the period, Norwich was particularly exposed to risings of the artisan class against the dominant feudalism. In Wat Tyler’s rebellion it was the centre of John Littester’s operations; and nearly two centuries later it formed the scene of Kett’s insurrection on Mousehold Heath. In fact, Norfolk and Kent answered then to Lancashire or the Black Country in our own time; and the Peterloos of the Middle Ages usually took place at Norwich or at Rochester.

  After the Reformation, Norwich lost a little in relative importance by the dissolution of its great monastery; but it still remained the acknowledged capital of perhaps the largest and most prosperous province in all England. Elizabeth established many Dutch refugees in the town. Macaulay has drawn a well-known and striking picture of its importance under the Stuarts as the chief seat of the chief manufacture of the realm, the residence of a bishop and chapter, and the home of a duke who kept an almost regal court in the old brick-built palace of his ancestors on the banks of the Wensum. Evelyn describes it as, “after London, one of the noblest cities of England.” Its population in 1693 was found by actual enumeration to be nearly 30,000 — an immense number for the seventeenth century. Unlike most other southern manufacturing towns, it has gone on steadily increasing in size and importance to the present day. Even the gradual shifting of the silk and woollen trade to the coal districts of the north has not interfered with its continuous prosperity. It stands, indeed, too centrally to a very isolated and peninsular region ever to be greatly affected by such commercial changes; by its very situation it is predestined probably throughout all time for the nucleus of all East Anglian enterprise. Beginning as a port, its harbour has been slowly silted up almost without attracting attention; and its chief trade has drifted away from it to better positions without checking at all the growth of its population. There is still much miscellaneous manufacturing industry, in crapes, mohairs, shoes, and so forth [besides the great mustard factory]; and the large surrounding district upon which Norwich can always draw for a supply of hands will probably enable it permanently to maintain its position so far as regards those minor trades in which great mechanical power is a secondary consideration. Norwich is now, however, the only great southern town save Reading, which owes its importance to manufactures alone. All the other
s are either military or naval, like Chatham, Portsmouth, and Plymouth; seaport towns, like Southampton and Bristol; or pleasure resorts, like Brighton and Bath. Alone among the trading staples of the Plantagenets, it has resisted the great contemporary movement which has carried almost all our industrial population northward towards the coal and iron districts, and has directed all our exports westward towards America and the colonies, or towards the Atlantic highway for India, China, and the East. Old England looked south-eastward to the Continent; modern England looks north-westward to the open sea. Norwich still remains fresh and vigorous in our midst as a solitary living monument of the earlier order.

  II. NORTH

  YORK

  Even at the present day, when York is known mainly as the great dining-station on the way to Scotland, none of us have wholly forgotten its immense historical importance as the capital of the North, and the immemorial seat of the northern archbishopric. But few people, probably, remember that York was once the chief city of all Britain, and that long afterwards it held for ages the second place among English towns without dispute. We have grown so accustomed to look upon Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield as standing next to London in population and political importance, that we hardly realise the time when the name of York aroused in every mind the picture of a great and opulent city, the metropolis of all England beyond the Trent. Indeed, in the most primitive agricultural days its very site naturally marked it out as the chief town of Britain: for the triassic basin of the Ouse and its tributaries forms the largest and richest agricultural plain in the island, and before the Roman invasion the Brigantes who tilled it ranked as foremost among the native Celtic tribes. In the very centre of this fertile champaign country, on a spot where the marshy stream of the Foss flows at an acute angle into the Ouse, the Brigantes had their dun or fort — the artificial mound now covered by the massive keep of Clifford’s tower and the modern buildings of the Castle. It was just such a triangular tongue of land as the Celtic engineers always preferred — naturally defended on two sides by the rivers, and closed on the third by a transverse stretch of swampy ground. The town stands, too, close to the head of navigation on the Ouse; and, relatively unimportant as this fact now appears, since Hull has usurped all the sea-going trade of the Humber, it is really the key to much of the early history of York. When the Romans first conquered south-eastern Britain their main towns were Colchester, Verulam, and London, in the basin of the Thames and its tributaries, the only other agricultural valley in England at all comparable to that of the rivers which drain into the Humber; and at that early stage of tillage only the river valleys and the downs were ever occupied. Indeed, it was almost a foregone necessity that while Britain remained an agricultural country, having relations with the European continent alone, its civilisation should cluster round the two great eastward estuarine rivers, the Humber and the Thames. It was not till trade began to spread across the open Atlantic that the two main westward outlets of the Mersey and the Severn began to rise into anything like equal importance. Thus, the earliest Roman cities were naturally placed in the Thames region: but after Agricola finally overran the rich plain of York the conquerors wisely chose the British fortress of Eburacum (at least from the days of Severus) as the seat of their provincial capital. Not only was it the centre of supplies, the middle point of the chief corn-exporting district, and the royal village of the leading native tribe, but it was also a main strategical key of the northern marches now that the principal seat of military operations lay along the Pictish border. Eburacum, in fact, became at once the Calcutta and the Allahabad, the Lahore and the Peshawur, of the Roman province.