by Grant Allen
Each little dale, however, still retained its own separate and subordinate chief. The great unhewn stone which stands on the summit of Manbury Castle, and gives its name to the hill, probably marks the grave of one such village potentate. Megalithic structures of this sort, often — though without any sufficient authority — described as “Druidical,” are common monuments of the bronze age of early Celtic culture. In almost every case, where they have been sufficiently explored, they are found to be nothing more than tombs, though doubtless quasi-religious services were performed in them, such as offerings to the ghost of the buried chieftain. The great “altar-stone” usually covers the actual remains, and is scored with little hollows or cups, in which food and drink were placed as gifts to the dead; while the surrounding trilithons only served, apparently, to add dignity and ornament to the site. Unexplored great circles, like Stonehenge, would probably yield the same results if they could be opened. But the Celtic interments usually display a further advance in the evolution of religious ideas above those of the Euskarian savages. The long barrows of the brown men contain in the centre a stone chamber, in which the dead man was buried with his arms and utensils, his wives and slaves; the barrow was the home of the dead man himself, just as the hut had been his home during life. The round barrows of the lighter-skinned Celts, however, usually contain no such chamber, and instead of a body we find in their centre one or more urns enclosing the ashes of the deceased. The body and all its belongings — clothes, implements, weapons, and insignia — were burned instead of being merely buried, because the idea was now prevalent that the ghost not the body survived, and that nothing could be of any use to the ghost unless its ghost also was set free by burning. On the highest summit of the whole range of downs enclosing the territory of the Katuriges stands Colbury Castle, the principal fortress of the entire tribe; and close by rises a large round tumulus of Celtic date, doubtless enclosing the remains of a great chief who at some time or other ruled over the little group of valleys beneath, including Churnside. The Peddington archæologists have opened this barrow also, and found in it two interments. The lowest, at the very bottom of the mound, contained a skeleton in a grave dug down below the natural surface and surrounded by pottery, together with a few bronze and stone weapons of a very rude Celtic type. But at a later period the mound had been reopened from above, and two funeral urns, with ashes and charred clothing, had been buried about half way down in its midst. Thus we have evidence of a progress in the Celtic period from the practice of inhumation to that of cremation, the latter marking a further development of the belief in immortality than the former. In the same way, it is possible that a political progress also occurred during the Celtic régime, and that the union of all the neighbouring valleys under a single dynasty at Colbury only took place in the later portion of that period.
III. THE ROMAN ROAD
The King’s highway from the county town to King’s Peddington, and thence westward to the next large city in the opposite direction, leads up hill and down dale in a surprising and rather annoying fashion. The coast thereabouts rises into a succession of tall cliffs, and subsides again into alluvial hollows at the mouth of each little river; but the road, instead of trying to skirt round the shoulders and edge its way through the lateral valleys, keeps straight on its course, regardless of these minor diversities in level, and mounts every hill up a steep ascent, unbroken by the ordinary zigzags or gradients of modern engineering science. It is a hard pull for the horses which draw the Peddington omnibus; but the view from each summit is very fine, and the long straight stretch of white road, running down the valley on one side and up again on the other, produces a pretty enough effect in its own curious way. You have only to look at it once to feel sure that it is a Roman road; indeed, as a matter of fact, the local antiquarians are satisfied that it is almost the only direct relic of the Roman civilisation now remaining in the immediate Churnside district. All roads lead to Rome; and the great Italian race has left no more typical symbol of its organising work in the world than these long straight military highways, intersecting so many parts of England, which they placed in direct communication with the capital of the empire. They mark a most noteworthy step in advance. The Roman road is to-day just as much the type of Roman civilisation as a thousand years hence the ruins of our English railways will be the type of the civilisation in whose midst we ourselves are living.
Long before the first Italian legion marched over the edge of Manbury Hill into Churnside, the Celtic inhabitants had paths and war-trails of their own. They had now passed beyond their bronze age, and had learned to manufacture weapons and implements of iron, and even to employ some imported coins. They knew how to make rude two-wheeled battle-cars, and they worked up artistic ornaments with jet and amber. Traces of this later and more advanced Celtic period have been found in the barrows at Colbury, belonging to the iron age; and in some cases even gold ornaments of delicate Etruscan workmanship have been distinguished in the midst of the rough-and-ready products of native handicraft. Indeed, before the Roman conquest, the Katuriges themselves had already their track-ways for purposes of trade, connecting them with their neighbours on either side, and ultimately with the great tidal port of Caer Lundin on the Thames, where, even at that early date, merchants from Gaul were in the habit of bringing Greek and Etruscan goods, much as Arab merchants now carry English cloth and Venetian beads to the natives of Central Africa. The tortuous British track from London to Colbury, and onwards to King’s Peddington, still exists as a modern cart-road, and still bears its old Celtic name of the Colway. But it is much narrower and more serpentine than the great Roman military work, for it meanders round the hill sides and goes at all sorts of oblique angles through the uplands, which were then covered with dense forest. It is, in fact, the old war-trail, maintained by each tribe for purposes of that rude kind of commerce which consists in passing foreign goods from hand to hand by means of barter; and it shows by its sinuous course that it was never planned at all — it grew up just as paths grow up across our own meadows or through the bush around Australian and Canadian clearings. The Colway enters the district of the Katuriges close beside the great hill-fort of Colbury Castle, the central stronghold of the entire league, so that no enemy could use it without a fierce struggle; and it passes thence from “castle” to “castle” till it reaches the Burdonian border at the fortified ford over the Esk, the next river along the coast from Churnside westward.
But while the Katuriges were chaffering with their Burdonian foes and customers over the proper price in bullocks for a string of glass ornaments from Massilia, or holding palavers at the ford about a question of tribal blood-feud, a new element had been introduced into the history of Britain in the eastern corner. Already the Churnside men knew the name of the Romans well enough by report; some of the old men had even heard of them from those who met them during the great war beyond the sea. For the Katuriges were accustomed to take their coracles on trading expeditions over to the coast of Brittany, as the people of the Malay archipelago now cross to Australia and the Asiatic mainland; and some of them had gone over to help the Veneti in their famous struggle with Caius Julius Cæsar himself. The merchants from Caer Lundin had reported, too, how the great Roman imperator had landed on the coast of Kentland, how the Kentish men had routed him with their war-cars, how he had returned again with more legions from Gaul, had crossed Thames at the Stepping Stones, and had defeated the whole Celtic host at Verulam. But all this was a hundred years ago, and most of the Churnside Celts had long forgotten all about it. One day, however, strange news must have reached the village which occupied the site of King’s Peddington. A scout from Colbury brought word that the ironclad people from the south had landed in the Thanet Strait under their great chief, had crossed Medway, and had captured the famous Trinovantian fortress of Camelodun, the stronghold of the leading tribe of Britain. It was, in fact, Claudius Cæsar who had arrived in the island. The Churnside warriors were told to hold themselves i
n readiness, to put on their war-paint, and to keep their cars in order for a tribal gathering at Colbury, if the ironclad people marched that way.
Claudius himself never came so far westward; he was sufficiently occupied with the conquest of the south-eastern corner. But before very long a [few hundred men] detached by [his general Aulus] Plautius made its way from London along the downs, and pushed the road on as they advanced to the border of the Katuriges at Colbury. Before attacking the castle, the legionaries secured the way in their rear, and then proceeded to make an onslaught on Colbury itself. Nowadays, Christian ideas have so profoundly modified our conduct that we always invent a pretext when we are going to annex a savage territory: the Romans, with their frank pagan brutality, made no pretexts, but simply annexed in exactly the same way as we do ourselves, only without that preceding formality. When they were ready, they stormed Colbury Castle, where they probably met with the same sort of reception as Englishmen have met with in Maori pahs and Zulu kraals; and in the end they cut to pieces every one of the Katuriges whom they found in the stockade. Then they proceeded to annex the five valleys; they took all the remaining Churnside men and pressed them for road-makers, they planted a staff on the top of each hill, and they put the gangs of terrified Celts to work under Roman supervision at building a long causeway from point to point, of a width and solidity which fairly astonished the poor Churnside folk. Each valley was used as a separate centre, and the gangs worked up the hill on either side to the selected point of junction at the summit; indeed, sometimes the unskilful workmen met at an angle, and one gang was found to have slightly overshot the mark, obvious traces of such a mistake being visible near Peddington windmill at the present day. That is how the King’s highway to Churnside first came into existence.
A magnificent work it is, this Portway Street, made and kept in order by forced labour, but bearing the impress of those grand, cruel, old task-masters of civilisation in every mile of its course. It is engineered much like our own railways, and is sixty feet in width. Near the large towns it rests on a thick bed of paved stone or concrete, and needs but little metalling even in our own macadamising age. In the valleys it is raised on an embankment against floods, and where it crosses the fen by the Churn — long since drained by the monks, but once a dangerous morass — it is laid down on a regular substratum of sound oaken piles. The poor tattooed barbarians of King’s Peddington could hardly fancy at first what its use could be; but the Romans went to work systematically, and began by securing their military connection with headquarters. In time, as the country was slowly Romanised in that long process of slaughter and annexation whereby “Ostorius Scapula, inch by inch, reduced Hither Britain to the form of a province” — pregnant words, covering a multitude of crimes — trading towns sprang up along the line, and the great road grew from a curse into a modified blessing. For eight hundred years it remained the only highway in all Churnside; and it is universally known even now as The Street. For the Celt learned its Latin name, the strata via, from the Roman legionaries; and the West Saxon pirate learned it again from his conquered and semi-civilised Celtic serfs four centuries afterwards. He had never seen a [paved] road in his own wild moorland by the Sleswick marshes, and he took the word from his Romanised slaves, as he took the Roman or Welsh name of every other adjunct of the higher civilisation which he had ruthlessly stamped out with fire and sword.
IV. THE ROMAN VILLA
One other relic of the Roman dominion besides the great causeway survives in Churnside at the present day. High up the valley, on a low slope which overhangs the ruins of Churney Abbey, a ploughman happened one autumn morning some forty years since to drive his coulter somewhat deeper than usual into the soil and blunted its edge against a hard object in the ground beneath. In a spirit of pure opposition to obstacles he drove the point of his plough once more against the stone, as he supposed it to be, and found that he could neither root it up nor circumvent it by a side twist. Scraping away the earth he came to his astonishment upon a regular cemented floor, made up of little bits of stone fastened together in a pretty pattern by concrete. His first impulse was to cover up the uncanny thing at once and say nothing about it to anybody; for fairy superstitions were not yet quite dead in Churnside, and the country people even then attributed all objects found under ground to the agency of the elves, and considered that the less said about them the better. The good folks are a jealous little people, who don’t care to have their secrets discovered by prying mortals, and actually to see one is certain death in the remote corners of the West country even at our own day. On second thoughts, however, the ploughman told the farmer of his find, and the farmer in turn told the rector and the squire. When our Peddington Society came to clear away the rubbish which covered it, they lighted upon a well-preserved tesselated pavement and other relics of a Roman villa, whose style showed it to date from the middle of the third century. It is one of the finest specimens in the south or west of England, where such remains are far rarer than in the great northern corn-lands which surround the military stations along the wall and the provincial capital of York.
This luxurious villa betokens a marvellous change in the life and industry of Churnside after the Roman conquest. For the Roman occupation of Britain altered greatly in its later days. At first, while Aulus Plautius and Ostorius Scapula were engaged in overrunning the island, it was a good deal like our own rough military occupation of South-Eastern Afghanistan at the present moment; but, after the national uprising under Boudicea, and Agricola’s subsequent consolidation and organisation of the new provinces, Britain grew more into the condition of an Indian kingdom under direct English government. The native chief of the Katuriges was permitted to retain his position as a Roman vassal, and even the petty headman of the Churn valley was recognised to some extent by the Roman officials. The chief village of the tribe was made the site of a Roman military town, and a principal posting station on the Portway Street. It appears in the itineraries as Caturidunum; but the Celtic name was probably Caer Catur, and the later Anglo-Saxon title was certainly Caturceaster, a form still preserved in the modern county-town of Carchester. For it is a significant fact that most of these old British villages and Roman strongholds remain even to this day the administrative capitals of English shires; and that, in spite of the supposed “extermination” of the Welsh population by the Jute, the Englishman, and the Saxon, we find York, Lincoln, London, Manchester, Rochester, Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Exeter, and all the other chesters keeping up their importance through all the vicissitudes of fifteen hundred years. The Teutonic pirates, as we know so well, massacred every living soul within them; yet oddly enough in every case they made a correct guess at their Roman names notwithstanding, and continued to call them by those names ever afterwards.
King’s Peddington itself bore no special Latin title of its own; it is only entered in the Roman route-books as ad Cernuam or ad Decimum — the Station “at the Churn” or “at the tenth milestone” from Carchester. But it must necessarily have continued still the metropolis and commercial centre of the Churnside valley. Its natural position on the sea at the mouth of the river would by itself have given the site so much local importance; while the fact that the great Roman highway ran through its midst further marked it out, of course, as the place where the taxes of the valley were gathered in kind, to be transmitted viâ Carchester and Portsmouth to Gaul and Italy. These taxes appear to have been collected almost entirely in the shape of corn; for the Churnside valley was now tilled throughout, from the downs to the sea, and even the lower slopes of the upland were covered in part with patches of bearded wheat. All Britain, in fact, had become a great grain-growing and grain-exporting country, a supplementary feeder for Rome herself and for the crowded cities of southern Gaul. Her corn went to swell the stock received from the Nile and the Euxine, and she herself stood to Italy in somewhat the same economical relation as Egypt, Canada, and the Western States now stand to modern England. Only at Rome the reciprocity wa
s really “all on one side.” In the vast ledger of the empire, Britain was entered solely on the debtor account. “Recruits, corn, tribute, slaves, mortgages”: these were the heads of the receipts from the British provinces; but the return items consisted only of prefects, legionaries, and a few trifling commercial articles of southern manufacture. We ourselves drain India heavily, but we pay her back something at least in European goods; the Romans drained Britain with tenfold rigour, and gave her back almost nothing, except a strong Government maintained by pitiless exactions.
